Solar Rare Solar Superstorm Could Prompt ‘Internet Apocalypse’ Lasting Several Months

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The “black swan” event of a solar superstorm directed at earth could prompt an “internet apocalypse” across the entire globe that could last for several months, new research (pdf) has warned.
University of California Irvine assistant professor Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi presented the new research, titled “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse,” last month during the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual conference for their Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).
“One of the greatest dangers facing the internet with the potential for global impact is a powerful solar superstorm,” Jyothi wrote in the new research paper.

“Although humans are protected from these storms by the earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, they can cause significant damage to man-made infrastructure. The scientific community is generally aware of this threat with modeling efforts and precautionary measures being taken, particularly in the context of power grids. However, the networking community has largely overlooked this risk during the design of the network topology and geo-distributed systems such as DNS and data centers,” he continued.

A solar storm, also known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), occurs when a large mass of plasma and highly magnetized particles violently eject from the sun. Large CME’s can contain up to a billion tons of matter and can get accelerated to large fractions of the speed of light.
When the earth is in the direct path of a CME, these magnetized and charged solar particles interact with the earth’s magnetic field, producing geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) that can potentially disrupt communication satellites and long-distance cables that provide the world with the internet.

According to Jyothi’s research, power grids, oil and gas pipelines, and networking cables are the most vulnerable to the impacts of GIC’s, while submarine cables, which span hundreds or thousands of kilometres, are even more vulnerable than land cables, due to their larger lengths.
Owing to a lack of real world data on the impacts of GIC’s on these submarine cables, scientists still don’t know how long it would take to repair them if such an event were to occur, and—just like natural disasters such as earthquakes—CME’s are extremely difficult for scientists to predict.

The research noted that the “distribution of internet infrastructure is skewed when compared to the distribution of internet users,” and high-latitude climates are more at risk if a solar storm were to occur.

Artist’s rendering of a solar storm hitting Mars and stripping ions from the planet’s upper atmosphere. (NASA)
Cables on servers at an internet data center in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, on July 25, 2018. (Yann Sschreiber/AFP/Getty Images)

“The U.S. is one of the most vulnerable locations with a high risk of disconnection from Europe during extreme solar events. Intra-continental connections in Europe are at a lower risk due to the presence of a large number of shorter land and submarine cables interconnecting the continent,” the report notes.

Meanwhile, if a severe solar superstorm were to occur, Singapore would maintain good connectivity to neighboring countries, while cities in China would be more likely to lose connectivity than India because China connects to much longer cables.
Australia, New Zealand, and other island countries in the region would be at high risk of losing most of their long-distance connections.
The research warns that a collapse of the internet—even one lasting a few minutes—could cause devastating losses to service providers and damage cyber-physical systems. The economic impact of an internet disruption for a day in the United States is estimated to be over $7 billion.

While the likelihood of a solar superstorm hitting earth is rare—with astrophysicists noting that the probability of extreme space weather events that directly impact earth occurring are between 1.6 percent to 12 percent per decade—they can still happen.
In 1921, a solar storm, driven by a series of coronal mass ejections, triggered extensive power outages and caused damage to telephone and telegraph systems associated with railroad systems in New York City and across the state.

Years later, in 1989, a solar storm bought an electrical power blackout to the entire province of Quebec, Canada.
“Although we have sentinel spacecraft that can issue early warnings of CMEs providing at least 13 hours of lead time, our defenses against GIC are limited. Hence, we need to prepare the infrastructure for an eventual catastrophe to facilitate efficient disaster management,” Jyothi said.

The research pointed to “increasing capacity in lower latitudes for improved resiliency during solar storms,” and having “mechanisms for electrically isolating cables connecting to higher latitudes from the rest” at submarine cable landing points to prevent large-scale failures.

The paper has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal.

You may find the PDF here https://www.ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf

Posted for fair use

Don't tell the grand solar minimum guys that the sun is full of sunspot activity.

yuppers. Mainly I liked the charts and graphs in the paper, those were a tidy
collation of data for me.

Presumably fiber-optic cables are not at risk.

Fiber is not safe neither...... They run a copper wire along its length to help locate when buried.
You can guess what electrical potential that can generate.

More predictive programming???

Yeah well..ya set your feet on the ground in the morning for another day at the races, and you take some risks.

Imagine the horror. It’s not the loss of research abilities or buying that will destroy mankind.
It will be the loss of porno for some but the fact that People will have to actually TALK to one another.
Can you imagine one person talking to one person on the phone. Teenagers and many 20-35 year olds will be so depressed that whole world won’t be able to follow their lives on Facebook or Instagram.

If there is a solar super storm, I imagine the internet will be the LEAST of our worries!!

jward said:

could prompt an “internet apocalypse” across the entire globe that could last for several months, new research (pdf) has warned.

Click to expand...

Just pointing out this is only a "could" plan, not can, or will. Kind of like the Red Team. So don't go laying awake at night worrying about it.

'Sides who will be worrying about the internet when there is no electricity of any kind. No cars, no lights, no AC, no hot water on demand, no______________________________________.

Telescope Steve said:

Don't tell the grand solar minimum guys that the sun is full of sunspot activity.

Click to expand...

Huh???
Suspicious Observers tracks sunspot activity daily.
In my opinion, they are also THE place to go for information on GSM. Check the archives.

electric grid may withstand a primary hit of CME, but taking out internet will secondarily shut down the grid

Nothing is really new here, except his prediction for undersea cables.
There, I am not sure. If the cables are fiber optic, then the conductor is glass and the transmission is light.
I would expect armored cable and then the problem would be at the termination point electronics.

I'm just not gonna worry my little head about this.

jward said:

While the likelihood of a solar superstorm hitting earth is rare—with astrophysicists noting that the probability of extreme space weather events that directly impact earth occurring are between 1.6 percent to 12 percent per decade—they can still happen.

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Especially in this day and age.

Is this another foreshadow article telling us what's coming? Is this why people are being told to stock up?

Seems perfect. How many would die in that pause of the internet of things.

People will lose their ever loving minds.

Wasn't that awfully long ago that some brilliant researchers warned of a global pandemic and garnered lots of research grants, infectious samples and gain of function knowledge in order to create viral simulations and solutions.

Telescope Steve said:

Don't tell the grand solar minimum guys that the sun is full of sunspot activity.

Click to expand...

For months it has but about 95% of the sunspots are very small and why they count these as sunspot I have no idea.
400 years ago they would not have been able to detect these small sunspots.

Back in 2004 I believe it was, we just missed getting hit by a kill shot flare that went off the sun. I still
have all the images from the soho sats from it. If it had gone off 3 days earlier we would have been royally
screwed. The aurora from it was awesome, turned the sky a wavy red and green over the southern tip
of Vancouver Island.

That's a whole lotta "coulds" in that article.

I've heard about the 'kill shot' for years on the old Art Bell radio program. I sure miss Art and his show.

Kathy in FL said:

That's a whole lotta "coulds" in that article.

Click to expand...

IMO, we will catch a major CME....at some point. Not unlike the possibility of a big space rock hitting.

No way to stop it, about all you can do is be as ready as your situation allows.

Can we rig it just kill cell phones? That would be epic!

it would be a real killer of Communism and globalism

Millwright said:

Click to expand...

love that map, what's it from?

I'd say it is a definite; was surprised to see the ways we could mitigate risk, though
hope someone somewhere is taking those factors into account- someone on our
side, I mean

Millwright said:

IMO, we will catch a major CME....at some point. Not unlike the possibility of a big space rock hitting.

No way to stop it, about all you can do is be as ready as your situation allows.

Click to expand...

Bring it on, i can't wait. The internet and cell phones would be a good start.
Mike

jward said:

love that map, what's it from?

Click to expand...

From an internet search.

Click or double click on it.

When it opens in its own window, right click.

You should get a box with several options, one being "Search internet for image".

Try that.

Oh how convenient. Internet goes down, no alternative media. Now all the news will come from the Deep State controlled MSM. Unless the military steps in, that's a Deep State checkmate.

Most of the long distance links are fiber, and the shorter hops are microwave, neither will have major issues with GICs outside of power supply. POTS copper phone lines are rarely used now, and as far as the medium itself, the shorter cable (coax) segments should hold up fine with GICs (the repeaters, line amps and other equipment may have issues). Could it cause issues in certain places and areas? Yes, but I don't see it being "no internet at all". If you want no internet at all, something as simple as a DNS root server DDoS can cripple things to 0%, you don't need a CME. Huawei in the mix could screw things up, or almost any other chinese device in the link. For that matter, all of the power line components that have been found to have chinese back doors.

The old telegraph lines were affected to the level that they were because they were either Earth Return (one wire for signal biased against a common earth ground), or several wires of signal biased against a single return conductor (unbalanced line), AND the fact that they were extremely long conductors between stations, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles long per segment. This let them become rather large, low frequency antennas. And the ones that were Earth Return, were guaranteed to get a massive "signal" from the CME because they were nothing more than a REALLY LONG @$$ (LOW FREQUENCY) NVIS antenna, which did exactly what NVIS antennas do best, lower HF band (and lower) RF power with the upper atmosphere directly above them. Do this over a couple hundred miles and you have some mean currents and voltages at both ends.

Old tech and new tech are apples and oranges in difference in so many ways. Old tech can't really be damaged by things like HPM EMP or HERF, new tech can unless it has perfect shielding and filtration on it's power and I/O ports. New tech is too interconnected to work correctly on it's own, for example, Cellular phone systems are so dependent on synchronization, that most cell sites have a GPS receiver there to keep things in sync. The encryption on the internet is the same way, time sync gets off, and encryption starts crapping out. And the individual systems themselves depend on each other WAY too much, with each grid depending on the others in a lot of places that make one very fragile if one of the others have issues, which in turn can being down others. For example, the power grids depend on the internet and GPS, if the internet goes down, the PLCs and SCADA systems may be out of touch with the rest of the grid controls, which could bring power down in the area. Power going down can definitely bring down internet in the area. GPS outages can bring down all sorts of stuff. Interconnectedness has it's pitfalls.

Artificially Intelli said:

Oh how convenient. Internet goes down, no alternative media. Now all the news will come from the Deep State controlled MSM. Unless the military steps in, that's a Deep State checkmate.

Click to expand...

Depends on the state of the military at the time...

30 years ago I trusted that situation (Mil, DoD, DARPA, 3 letter agencies, Gov in general) to do what is right for the people that elected them in a LOT more than I do now. Of course, now we are left wondering who actually "voted" them in.

Lol, 'old news' for me. Dave at 'X22report' has been talking about this for almost 2 weeks now. I'm posting his 'X22report' videos down in 'ALT'.

parocan said:

Back in 2004 I believe it was, we just missed getting hit by a kill shot flare that went off the sun. I still
have all the images from the soho sats from it. If it had gone off 3 days earlier we would have been royally
screwed. The aurora from it was awesome, turned the sky a wavy red and green over the southern tip
of Vancouver Island.

Click to expand...

It was 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 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.

Solar storm of 2012
The region that produced the outburst was thus not pointed directly towards Earth at that time. The strength of the eruption was comparable to the 1859 Carrington event that caused damage to electrical equipment worldwide, which at that time consisted mostly of telegraph systems.

Overview


The event occurred in 2012, near the local maximumof sunspots that can be seen in this graph.

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, it survived the encounter and provided researchers with valuable data.

Based on the collected data, the eruption consisted of two separate ejections which were able to reach exceptionally high strength as the interplanetary medium around the Sun had been cleared by a smaller CME four days earlier.

The event occurred at a time of high sunspot activity during Solar cycle 24.

Predicted effects
Had the CME hit the Earth, it is likely that it would have inflicted serious damage to electronic systems on a global scale. A 2013 study estimated that the economic cost to the United States would have been between US$600 billion and $2.6 trillion. Ying D. Liu, professor at China's State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, estimated that the recovery time from such a disaster would have been about four to ten years.

SHOULD… the Internet go down, the best response to have “on hand”, and safely stored beforehand (galvanized trash can as a farraday cage), would be a couple of laptops, as many deep cycle batteries as you could store (not on a cement floor), a couple of solar panels, some routers, and a few cantennas. All you’d need to create a mesh network, for local farm or village comms.

If you’re truly worried about no Internet, this is how you plan for it.

[and maybe a copy of a certain library…]

I have been thinking they will shut the internet down, but not because the sun took it out; to 'protect & save us from hackers.'

With all of these big ransomware attacks lately, I see them shutting it all down so the bad hackers can't do us any more harm via the internet. It is just too risky and expensive to have all of these attackers demanding so much money. It is best that we just shut down all internet activity so they can't get to us. It's for your protection. It's the only way we can be safe.

Telescope Steve said:

Don't tell the grand solar minimum guys that the sun is full of sunspot activity.

Click to expand...

Yea wasn't it last week they had 12 sunspots at one time?

Internet shutdown will be because they dont want people sharing shocking info from websites with others.

This way they can control the narrative and let shocking news "age" for a few days to calm down before people can share their outrage and discuss what to do.

Double_A said:

Internet shutdown will be because they dont want people sharing shocking info from websites with others.

This way they can control the narrative and let shocking news "age" for a few days to calm down before people can share their outrage and discuss what to do.

Click to expand...

THIS ^^^

It will be to control the flow of information. And the "sunspots" will get the blame. But don't worry, The Gobberment is on the job and will save us. Estimated time till restoration is approx. 6 months or more. JMO