The probability of a severe solar storm wreaking geomagnetic havoc on Earth is pretty small, but it’s enough to cause policy-makers alarm
OTTAWA — Massive electrical grid outages. Malfunctioning GPS. No satellite communications. Food, water and fuel shortages.
It wouldn’t necessarily take a zombie apocalypse for a bunch of modern systems to go on the fritz at once, or for society to slide back into what a Canadian government scientist called a Stone Age, requiring a “long reboot” to recover.
A weaponized electromagnetic pulse could cause critical infrastructure to shut down on a city- or region-wide scale. But solar storms are a threat that barely gets attention, and which could cause even more damage, affecting entire continents.
“The sun has a temper,” says Pierre Langlois, the project lead for space utilization at the Canadian Space Agency, which is now developing a strategy to deal with such a scenario.
The probability of a severe solar storm wreaking geomagnetic havoc on Earth is pretty small. But it’s enough to cause policy-makers alarm, because most of the world hasn’t planned ahead for potential disaster. Some European studies, Langlois said, warn of “horror story” scenarios.
The CSA’s first step will be finding a private-sector partner to help undertake a study on how space weather could affect Canadian infrastructure systems. A request for proposals published last week sets a study time of 15 months and a budget of $300,000.
The study won’t just look at cataclysmic scenarios but also at more-routine effects of space weather, like solar wind, flares that affect radio frequencies, radiation storms that send particles towards us and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt satellite systems and other technologies.
The sun has a temper
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides space weather forecasts, but Langlois said such warnings come at the last minute. Unlike a hurricane, you can’t see a solar storm coming days in advance.
Space weather’s effects aren’t just theoretical. In 1989, all of Quebec was blacked out for nine hours due to what’s called a coronal mass ejection from the sun. According to NASA, 200 power grids in the U.S. were affected too, though none of those suffered blackouts.
A truly large-scale storm hasn’t been observed since 1859, and what’s known as the Carrington event (named after a scientist who witnessed and documented light flares visible in the atmosphere). This caused, per NASA, a worldwide failure of telegraph systems and intense auroras that could be viewed in most parts of the world.
Much of the technology developed since then could be affected by a storm of similar strength. That scenario isn’t so far-fetched: in 2012 an ejection from the sun as powerful as the Carrington event just missed Earth. NASA estimated that storm could have caused US $2 trillion in damage, according to NASA. The agency quotes physicist Pete Riley, who that same year estimated the probability of a Carrington-class storm hitting Earth in the next decade was 12 per cent.
William R. Graham, a head of NASA in the ‘80s, told a Congressional committee in 2008 that if an event caused the U.S. to essentially go back to a low-tech, rural economy, a massive loss of life could be possible. Graham, then chair of the U.S. commission tasked with assessing the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack, said the survival of roughly 30 million, or 10 per cent of Americans, could be “in the correct range.”
Sadly, the best way to convince people to invest in something is for them to pay the price
Last November, a European Commission Joint Research Centre report warned effects of a severe solar storm would ripple to “nearly every industry sector” and inevitably affect food and water supply, public order and safety.
For Canada’s part, with the new study the CSA is trying to assess potential effects on health institutions, water distribution, fuel, banking and financial systems, emergency services, government, road transportation, railway networks, air travel, nautical transportation, pipelines, emerging technologies, communications systems, navigation and all manner of satellites.
Systems aren’t necessarily easy to back up. In North America, Langlois said, it can take six months to produce transformers used in power grids. If multiple transformers are affected by a solar storm and stop working, there’d be some tough decisions. “Who gets the first one? Canadians are going to freeze to death if they don’t get heat,” he said. It’s not necessarily easy to transport them, either — they’re the size of houses.
An intense solar storm could also affect satellites and knock out, whether temporarily or more permanently, the global positioning system. A lack of GPS, or a lapse in accuracy, would affect aircraft (both manned and unmanned) and, in the not-so-distant future, things like driverless cars. “We’re getting heavily dependent on space,” Langlois said.
Because big events are hard to predict and happen so rarely, it’s challenging to forecast problems “without crying wolf,” he said, and to convince government, industry and the owners of critical infrastructure to take preventative measures.
“Sadly, the best way to convince people to invest in something is for them to pay the price,” he said, conceding he and others have been working for a while to get such a study off the ground in Canada. “It’s very hard to convince management and other departments of the importance of space weather and all the other catastrophes that occur very seldom.”
Solar activity is charted out based on 22-year cycles. We are now at a low point, but that doesn’t mean the sun is predictable. The biggest solar flare in the past 12 years was recorded last week.
CSA plans to award a contract in October and Canada hopes to update the United Nations, which is trying to co-ordinate global action on the issue, by early next year.