Could a powerful solar storm wipe out the internet?
In Becky Chambers’ 2019 novel Learn if Lucky, a massive solar storm wipes out Earth’s internet, leaving a group of astronauts stranded in space with no way home. It’s a scary prospect, but could a solar storm bring down the Internet in real life? And if so, how likely is that to happen?
Yes, it could happen, but it would require a giant solar storm, Matthew Owens, a solar physicist at the University of Reading in the UK, told Live Science. “You would really need some kind of massive event to do that, which is not impossible,” Owens said. “But I would think a power grid failure is more likely.” In fact, this phenomenon has already happened on a small scale.
Solar storms, also known as space weather, occur when sun emits an intense burst electromagnetic radiation. This disturbance ejects waves of energy that travel outward, affecting other bodies in the solar system, including: Country:. When rogue electromagnetic waves interact with the Earth’s own magnetic field, they have several effects.
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The first is that they generate electrical currents in Earth’s upper atmosphere, heating the air “just like your electric blanket works,” Owens said. These geomagnetic storms can create beautiful auroras appear over the polar regions, but they can also interfere radio signals and GPS. What’s more, when the atmosphere heats up, it blows up like marshmallows, adding extra drag to low-Earth-orbiting satellites and knocking off small pieces of space junk.
Another effect of space weather is more terrestrial. As powerful electric currents flow through our planet’s upper atmosphere, they generate powerful currents that also flow through the crust. This can disrupt electrical conductors sitting above the crust, such as power lines, the network of transmission lines that carry electricity from generating plants to homes and buildings. The result is localized power outages that can be difficult. One such event hit Quebec on March 13, 1989, resulting in a 12-hour blackout; NASA (opens in new tab). Recently, A solar flare knocked out 40 Starlink satellites when SpaceX The space weather forecast could not be verified, Live Science previously reported.
Fortunately, taking out a few Starlink satellites isn’t enough to disrupt global Internet access. To completely destroy the Internet, a solar storm would have to disrupt the super-long fiber optic cables that run under the oceans and connect the continents. Every 30 to 90 miles (50 to 145 kilometers), these cables are equipped with repeaters to help amplify their signal as it travels. While cables themselves are not vulnerable to geomagnetic storms, repeaters are. And if one repeater goes down, it can be enough to take out the entire cable, and if enough cables go down, it can cause “internet apocalypseLive Science reported earlier.
A shutdown of the global Internet could be potentially catastrophic. it will disrupt everything from the supply chain to the medical system to the stock market to the basic ability of individuals to work and communicate.
There are several ways to protect the Internet from the next megasolar storm. The first is to fortify power grids, satellites and submarine cables against stress caused by power surges, including failures to strategically shut down the grids during a solar storm.
A second, inexpensive way is to develop a better method for long-term forecasting of solar storms.
Can we predict solar storms?
Solar storms are also quite difficult to predict. In part, they can be “very hard to pin down,” Owens said. “Because space weather has existed for thousands of years, the technology it affects has only existed for a few decades.”
Current technology can predict solar storms up to two days before they hit Earth based on their activity sun spots, black spots on the surface of the sun, indicating areas of high plasma activity. But scientists can’t track solar storms the way they do storms. Instead, they turn to other clues, such as where the sun is in its current solar cycle. NASA and the European Space Agency are currently investigating ways to make such predictions using a combination of historical data and more recent observations.
The sun goes through roughly 11-year cycles of higher or lower activity, depending on the sun National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (opens in new tab), and the next peak of its activity, known as solar maximum, should be around 2025. However, recent solar maxima have been relatively mild, leading scientists to suspect that our sun may be in for an extended period of lower activity. “The sun has been pretty quiet since the ’90s,” Owens says. The last global geomagnetic storm (at least recorded) was the so-called “Carrington event1859, during which the auroras were seen as far away as Cuba and Honolulu, Hawaii. If the Internet had existed during this event, there is a possibility that it would have been severely disrupted.
Hopefully, scientists will be able to predict or minimize the impact of the next Carrington event before we find ourselves in a future without the internet… although, given the terrifying depths of social media, there may be worse fates ahead.
