I get a bulletin each week of radio propagation-related news
from the American Radio Relay League which is an amateur radio
organization. This week's newsletter remembered a very large
Solar flare which happened in March of 1989. The flare caused
auroras in many places that never normally see them and a number
of other weird things that let us know that our nearest star can
kick up some dust when conditions get right.
The Sun is encased in an atmosphere which normally holds
in most of what makes up the Sun but can behave like a garbage
bag or flour sack that has sprung leaks. The stuff inside which
is mostly subatomic particles spews out of the holes and blows
off in to space. It is called the Solar Wind and sometimes these
streams face toward the Earth and that's when the fun starts.
We humans and other living things on Earth aren't
bothered directly by these blasts of Sun goo, but they interact
with the Earth's magnetic field making it sometimes stronger and
other times weaker within the space of a few seconds or minutes.
It's these times when the auroras begin to glow in all the
colors of the rainbow due to electrically charged particles of
the very thin air about 60 miles above the Earth.
Radio signals that depend on the ionosphere get
clobbered and one can forget listening to the usual stations
because nature is not cooperating in reflecting the signals as
she usually does.
There's even more weird stuff during a big Solar flare.
Electric wires, pipelines and any other very long pieces
of metal begin to behave like giant generators, producing
electric currents along their lengths. This actually can damage
communications and power systems because the foreign currents
and voltages are sufficient to burn out electrical devices not
meant to handle such stresses. It is like a slow-motion
lightning strike. In 1989, the city of Montrialle had power
failures caused by the flare.
In the North Sea, they had to stop oil field activity
for a day because magnetic compasses were reading as much as 5
degrees off and the error was variable from second to second so
nobody could trust the readings and ships could go off course
and collide.
We also can loose communications satellites as they get
sprayed with the particles that are actually sped up as they get
caught in the Earth's magnetic field so these events do cause a
lot of expensive disruption when they happen.
Fortunately, they don't happen without warning.
Astronomers see the flares on the Sun about 8 minutes after they
occur. That is how long light takes to reach Earth from the Sun.
The subatomic particles are actually solid mass all be
it very tiny pieces so they travel a little slower than light
and reach us between 12 and 36 hours later so we have that much
warning to turn off critical systems so they don't get fried.
There was the mother of all Solar flares in September of
1859 which would have done very substantial damage to our world
if we had had much in the way of electronics then, but the
telegraph networks in developed parts of the world were all that
existed then and they were disrupted somewhat during a week or
so of Solar fireworks.
The chances of having some kind of event like that are to
put it mildly, slim. Yes, it could happen, but I don't want to
scare anybody. As far as we know, we've never had anything like
the flare of 1859 in recorded human history except for that one
week. Auroras were visible almost all over the Earth and there
would have been accounts of that even centuries ago although
people wouldn't have understood what was happening.
I know people who actually worry about such things.
There are plenty of things to worry about in life and big Solar
flares are somewhere in the realm of possibility similar to
stumbling over a gold bar with my name engraved on it while
walking home today.
Martin
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