DISASTER Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm like the Carrington Event!!!!

[JohnGaltfla]

Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA





Washington (AFP) - Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.





The extreme space weather that tore through Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.


However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on.


"If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire," said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.


Instead the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, a solar observatory that is "almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event," NASA said.
Scientists have analyzed the treasure trove of data it collected and concluded that it would have been comparable to the largest known space storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event.


It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.


"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," said Baker.



The National Academy of Sciences has said the economic impact of a storm like the one in 1859 could cost the modern economy more than two trillion dollars and cause damage that might take years to repair.


Experts say solar storms can cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything from radio to GPS communications to water supplies -- most of which rely on electric pumps.


They begin with an explosion on the Sun's surface, known as a solar flare, sending X-rays and extreme UV radiation toward Earth at light speed.


Hours later, energetic particles follow and these electrons and protons can electrify satellites and damage their electronics.



Next are the coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide.



These are often deflected by Earth's magnetic shield, but a direct hit could be devastating.


There is a 12 percent chance of a super solar storm the size of the Carrington event hitting Earth in the next 10 years, according to physicist Pete Riley, who published a paper in the journal Space Weather earlier this year on the topic.


His research was based on an analysis of solar storm records going back 50 years.
"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," said Riley.


"It is a sobering figure."

 

[2x2]

NOAA space weather site. lots of stuff here.

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

 

[packyderms_wife]

There was an article about this here a few weeks back.

K-

 

[BREWER]

Greetings, John: And the take-away is that here we are fully two years later and it's the same ol' $hit...we will never, NEVER be warned ahead of time to do anything meaningful in those few hours before the hammer comes down.
Lesson: You have to have all your alt-energy preps IN PLACE, working, extra parts, and know HOW-TO-REPAIR all of them or do without.

The alternative is not 18th century...more like 8th century--The Dark Ages..quite literally. Take care. BREWER

"Washington (AFP) - Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.

The extreme space weather that tore through Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.

snip

It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.


"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," said Baker."

 

[2x2]

If I did this right????? Look at the left side of the sun, coming towards us,, see how bright it is. How big is that going to be???

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sxi/images/latest_sxi.png

 

[packyderms_wife]

If one of these things ever hit us, aside from the cities in the US, Europe stands to lose the most. Most of the US is considered fly over country, ditto this on Canada and Mexico and probably all of South America, there are still resources out here in the hinter lands. Will there be lots of deaths? Yes. Will there be little despots trying to set up their own kingdoms preying on the ignorance of others? Yes. But the cities and most of europe will fare much worse, last stats I saw on most european countries the population density was something like 300 people per square acre, where as out here it's more like 3 people per square acre.

population density map of the US

population density map of Europe

K-

 

[von Koehler]

The takeaway for me is that a 12% annual chance of an event means that there is a 1 in 8 chance in any given year.

Those are extremely poor odds considering the catastrophic outcome.

Here in the USA, probably only the Amish are truly prepared.

FA

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

I've been searching around and so far can't come up with the magnitude of the flare - but I found this article which I'll add to the discussion.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm/
(fair use applies)

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012

July 23, 2014: If an asteroid big enough to knock modern civilization back to the 18th century appeared out of deep space and buzzed the Earth-Moon system, the near-miss would be instant worldwide headline news.

Two years ago, Earth experienced a close shave just as perilous, but most newspapers didn't mention it. The "impactor" was an extreme solar storm, the most powerful in as much as 150+ years.

"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.

A ScienceCast video recounts the near-miss of a solar superstorm in July 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw

Baker, along with colleagues from NASA and other universities, published a seminal study of the storm in the December 2013 issue of the journal Space Weather. Their paper, entitled "A major solar eruptive event in July 2012," describes how a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) tore through Earth orbit on July 23, 2012. Fortunately Earth wasn't there. Instead, the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft.

"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," says Baker. "If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.

Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of high-technology. They begin with an explosion--a "solar flare"—in the magnetic canopy of a sunspot. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of our atmosphere; side-effects of this "solar EMP" include radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. Minutes to hours later, the energetic particles arrive. Moving only slightly slower than light itself, electrons and protons accelerated by the blast can electrify satellites and damage their electronics. Then come the CMEs, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide. Analysts believe that a direct hit by an extreme CME such as the one that missed Earth in July 2012 could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

Before July 2012, when researchers talked about extreme solar storms their touchstone was the iconic Carrington Event of Sept. 1859, named after English astronomer Richard Carrington who actually saw the instigating flare with his own eyes. In the days that followed his observation, a series of powerful CMEs hit Earth head-on with a potency not felt before or since. Intense geomagnetic storms ignited Northern Lights as far south as Cuba and caused global telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices and thus disabling the 'Victorian Internet."

A similar storm today could have a catastrophic effect. According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.

"In my view the July 2012 storm was in all respects at least as strong as the 1859 Carrington event," says Baker. "The only difference is, it missed."

In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years.

The answer: 12%.

"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," says Riley. "It is a sobering figure."

In his study, Riley looked carefully at a parameter called Dst, short for "disturbance – storm time." This is a number calculated from magnetometer readings around the equator. Essentially, it measures how hard Earth's magnetic field shakes when a CME hits. The more negative Dst becomes, the worse the storm. Ordinary geomagnetic storms, which produce Northern Lights around the Arctic Circle, but otherwise do no harm, register Dst=-50 nT (nanoTesla). The worst geomagnetic storm of the Space Age, which knocked out power across Quebec in March 1989, registered Dst=-600 nT. Modern estimates of Dst for the Carrington Event itself range from -800 nT to a staggering -1750 nT.

In their Dec. 2013 paper, Baker et al. estimated Dst for the July 2012 storm. "If that CME had hit Earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have registered a Dst of -1200, comparable to the Carrington Event and twice as bad as the March 1989 Quebec blackout."

The reason researchers know so much about the July 2012 storm is because, out of all the spacecraft in the solar system it could have hit, it did hit a solar observatory. STEREO-A is almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event.

"The rich data set obtained by STEREO far exceeded the relatively meagre observations that Carrington was able to make in the 19th century," notes Riley. "Thanks to STEREO-A we know a lot of about the magnetic structure of the CME, the kind of shock waves and energetic particles it produced, and perhaps most importantly of all, the number of CMEs that preceded it."

It turns out that the active region responsible for producing the July 2012 storm didn't launch just one CME into space, but many. Some of those CMEs "plowed the road" for the superstorm.

A paperin the March 2014 edition of Nature Communications by UC Berkeley space physicist Janet G. Luhmann and former postdoc Ying D. Liu describes the process: The July 23rd CME was actually two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes. This double-CME traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by yet another CME four days earlier. As a result, the storm clouds were not decelerated as much as usual by their transit through the interplanetary medium.

"It's likely that the Carrington event was also associated with multiple eruptions, and this may turn out to be a key requirement for extreme events," notes Riley. "In fact, it seems that extreme events may require an ideal combination of a number of key features to produce the 'perfect solar storm.'"

"Pre-conditioning by multiple CMEs appears to be very important," agrees Baker.

A common question about this event is, how did the STEREO-A probe survive? After all, Carrington-class storms are supposed to be mortally dangerous to spacecraft and satellites. Yet STEREO-A not only rode out the storm, but also continued taking high-quality data throughout.

"Spacecraft such as the STEREO twins and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (a joint ESA/NASA mission) were designed to operate in the environment outside the Earth's magnetosphere, and that includes even quite intense, CME-related shocks," says Joe Gurman, the STEREO project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "To my knowledge, nothing serious happened to the spacecraft."

The story might have been different, he says, if STEREO-A were orbiting Earth instead of traveling through interplanetary space.

"Inside Earth's magnetosphere, strong electric currents can be generated by a CME strike," he explains. "Out in interplanetary space, however, the ambient magnetic field is much weaker and so those dangerous currents are missing." In short, STEREO-A was in a good place to ride out the storm.

"Without the kind of coverage afforded by the STEREO mission, we as a society might have been blissfully ignorant of this remarkable solar storm," notes Baker. "How many others of this scale have just happened to miss Earth and our space detection systems? This is a pressing question that needs answers."

If Riley's work holds true, there is a 12% chance we will learn a lot more about extreme solar storms in the next 10 years—when one actually strikes Earth.

Says Baker, "we need to be prepared."

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Here's how it was reported on Space Weather at the time:

http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=23&month=07&year=2012
(fair use applies)

VERY FAST FARSIDE CME: A coronal mass ejection (CME) blasted away from the sun this morning with rare speed: 2930 km/s or 6.5 million mph. CMEs moving this fast occur only once every ~5 to 10 years. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory recorded the cloud's emergence on July 23rd starting around 0300 UT:

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2012/23jul12/rcme_anim.gif?PHPSESSID=v5a2n1qqafocmgntfhlddtvab7

The source of the CME was sunspot AR1520, which sparked many bright auroras earlier this montth when it was on the Earthside of the sun. Now, however, the active region is transiting the sun's farside so this blast was not geoeffective. One can only imagine the geomagnetic storms such a fast CME could produce if it were heading our way. Stay tuned for additional analysis.

Update: According to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, this CME will miss all of the solar system's inner planets.

see: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/downloads/20120723_033800_anim.tim-den.gif
(too large of a file to embed)