I’m talking about solar storms, of course, tremendous blasts of particles and radiation from the Sun which can interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere and overwhelm anything with a wire.
Aurora activity erupted across the entire planet. We’re not talking about those rare Northern Lights enjoyed by the Alaskans, Canadians and Northern Europeans in the audience. We’re talking about everyone, everywhere on Earth. Even in the tropics.
In fact, the brilliant auroras were so bright you could read a book to them.
The beautiful night time auroras was just one effect from the monster solar flare. The other impact was that telegraph lines and electrical grids were overwhelmed by the electricity pushed through their wires. Operators got electrical shocks from their telegraph machines, and the telegraph paper lit on fire.
What happened? The most powerful solar flare ever observed is what happened.
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The solar storm of 2012 that almost sent us back to a post-apocalyptic Stone Age
While you didn’t see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn’t some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though — no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. Almost two years ago to the day, our most bounteous and fantastical celestial body — the Sun — kicked out one of the largest solar flares and coronal mass ejections ever recorded. And it missed Earth by a whisker. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive storm.
The interdependency of different systems in the US. If the power fails, so does everything else.
We had a near miss in 2012!
Solar storm of 2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012
The solar storm of 2012 was an unusually large and strong coronal mass ejection (CME) event that occurred on July 23 that year. It missed the Earth with a margin of approximately nine days, as the equator of the Sun rotates around its own axis with a period of about 25 days.[1] The region that produced the outburst was thus not pointed directly towards the Earth at that time. The strength of the eruption was comparable to the 1859 Carrington event that caused damage to electric equipment worldwide, which at that time consisted mostly of telegraph stations.[2]
The eruption tore through Earth's orbit, hitting the STEREO-A spacecraft. The spacecraft is a solar observatory equipped to measure such activity, and because it was far away from the Earth and thus not exposed to the strong electrical currents that can be induced when a CME hits the Earth's magnetosphere,[2] it survived the encounter and provided researchers with valuable data.
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The Carrington Event: September 1st, 1859
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/03/the-carrington-event_-september-1-1859/
Three New EMP Commission Reports Released
https://michaelmabee.info/three-new-emp-commission-reports-released/
On May 8, 2018 the Department of Defense released three new EMP Commissionreports. The “Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack” is a Congressional chartered commission that has been studying EMP, GMD and other threats to the electric grid and critical infrastructures since 2000.
