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Thursday, May 31, 2012

The history of the solar storm


A geomagnetic storm turn off the electricity grid in most of Quebec,in march 1989.At that time,  millions of Canadians was leaving without power for hours.In March 1989,The NASA reports,in January 1994 the communications satellite 290 million Anik E2   Canada, was shat down by a solar storm, and took six  months and $ 50-70 million put back into operation.One of the most dangerous contributors to solar storms is a coronal mass ejection (CME), a great cloud of charged particles belched from the sun and sailing through space at supersonic speeds.

According to a video on Space.com, a CME hit the Earth in 1998, knocking a satellite space communications, going to crash into the central U.S. and disrupting nearly every pager signal in the country.
But in 1859, a CME of extreme intensity, exceptionally high speed and opposite magnetic fields hit the planet Earth. The result of this "perfect storm" temporarily doubled the light of the sun, causing auroras of color - usually are visible only in polar regions - to be seen as far south as Hawaii and shorting out telegraph wires, starting fires in U.S. and Europe. 
There was no satellite or television technology, and power grids, no automated teller machines and global positioning systems that help drive traffic by land, sea and air.
"A repeat of the current event [1859]," concludes the report from NASA, "would cause much more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruption."
When these systems do fall and cascade other side jump quickly bring very serious consequences: "The impact of the storm could fall on networking structures, with devastating effects: the distribution of potable water will be quite impossible in a few hours, lost food that are in chambers (refrigerators) in the space between 12 and 24 hours, transport will also be affected, "Jacco Van der Warp expected, expert astrophysicist space threats.
But what is worse, write the researchers, led by Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, is that "the emergency services could be disrupted and lost control over the country." Will be no interruption of transport, communications, banking and financial systems, government services, the decline in drinking water distribution pump failure, and loss of perishable foods and medicines due to lack of refrigeration.

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