TORONTO —
Imagine if one day the internet was down not just in your neighbourhood, but across the globe, knocked out by a threat from space: an enormous solar superstorm.
It sounds like science fiction, but a new study says it could become our reality earlier than we think if we don’t prepare properly for the next time the sun spits a wave of magnetized plasma at us.
“Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 — 12 per cent,” the study states.
“Paying attention to this threat and planning defenses against it, […] is critical for the long-term resilience of the internet.”
It paints a scary picture of what could happen if an enormous solar storm hits us: submarine cables between countries shut down, power grids offline, data centres from web giants at risk of going dark.
But how do we even start protecting against it?
Solar activity isn’t easy to predict. While we know that the sun has an 11-year cycle that lets us track when solar activity will be higher, whether these high points will have harmless solar flares or large-scale solar weather events isn’t easy to pinpoint.
The sun also has a longer cycle that takes approximately 80-100 years called the Gleissberg cycle, in which large-scale solar events during solar maxima (the high point of the 11-year-cycle) become four times more likely to occur.
The two most recent solar cycles, from 1996-2008 and 2008-2020, were part of a minimum activity period during the Gleissberg cycle.
“In other words, modern technological advancement coincided with a period of weak solar activity and the sun is expected to become more active in the near future,” the study stated.
This means that the modern internet infrastructure we’ve developed over the last few decades has never been tested by strong solar activity.
WHAT IS A SOLAR SUPERSTORM?
Also known as a geomagnetic storm, a solar superstorm is what happens when something called a coronal mass ejection (CME) escapes the sun and strikes the Earth.
Large portions of the sun’s outer layer, the corona, can be blown off into space due to changes in the sun’s magnetic fields. These clouds of magnetized particles and superheated gas can reach the Earth in anywhere from a day to four or five days.
If Earth is in the path of a CME, the solar plasma will slam into the Earth’s magnetic field and cause a geomagnetic storm. While this doesn’t directly harm any humans on the planet below, it can impact our magnetic field and cause “strong electric currents on the Earth’s surface that can disrupt and even destroy various human technologies.”
We know this because it’s happened before — just never in the age of the internet.
The first recorded CME to greatly impact Earth was in 1859. Known as the Carrington event, it caused large-scale telegraph outages in North America and Europe, with equipment fires and electric shocks to telegram operators reported across the globe.
The CME that caused it was travelling so fast it reached the Earth in only 17.6 hours, and scientists have theorized in the past that if such an event struck us today, it could knock out power for 20-40 million people in the U.S. alone for up to two years.
The strongest CME of the past century was in 1921. But smaller CMEs have impacted us since, including one that knocked out the power grid in Quebec in 1989, plunging the entire province into darkness.
Just when the next big CME could be isn’t certain. The study stated that this next solar cycle is on track to have between 210 and 260 sunspots at the height of the sun’s cycle, which is twice the amount that occurred at the peak in the last cycle. CMEs originate near sunspots, so this can be a predictor for the strength and likelihood of a CME.
The new study pointed out that in the last Gleissberg cycle, its minimum was in 1910, and a huge CME occurred just over a decade later. Since we’re coming out of a period of minimum solar activity, we should be on the alert.
“Given that a strong solar cycle that can produce a Carrington-scale event can occur in the next couple of decades, we need to prepare our infrastructure now for a potential catastrophic event,” the study stated.
WHAT IS AT RISK?
The study looked at the physical infrastructure that could be at risk, from cable networks to data centers, to the location of more than 46,000,000 internet routers.
A big threat during solar superstorms is geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) that flow through ground-based power grids and systems, putting these at risk as well as oil and gas pipelines and networking cables.
The real worry is how these would affect long-distance cables.
While long-distance cables that carry signals in optical fibres are not at a risk from GICs because there is no actual electric current in them, conductors that accompany them to power repeaters, called power feeding lines, are at risk.
Submarine cables, which are laid in the sea to carry telecommunication signals, have never been stress-tested by a strong solar event. These undersea cables keep our global internet going, carrying almost all of our communications.
“During catastrophic events with a large probability of repeater failure, at an inter-repeater distance of 150 km, nearly 80 per cent of undersea cables will be affected, leaving an equal fraction of endpoints unreachable, whereas 52 per cent of cables and 17 per cent of nodes in the U.S. land network are affected,” the study predicted.
Satellites are also at risk during solar superstorms, not because of electric currents caused by the magnetic fields interfacing, but because of coming into contact with the supercharged particles themselves.
“Both surface-based and satellite-based communication systems are under high risk of collapse if a Carrington-scale event occurs again,” the study pointed out.
The study looked at the weak points of physical infrastructure across the globe in order to estimate what could happen in best and worst case scenarios in different countries.
Assuming there’s only low failure of long-distance cables, in the U.S., most cables connected to Oregon would fail, and connectivity to Canada and Europe would fail completely.
In China, while more than half of their connections would be unaffected, Shanghai would lose all of its long-distance connectivity.
Assuming high levels of failure, all long-distance connectivity would be lost on the West coast of the U.S., except for one cable connecting Southern California to Hawaii. The U.K. would lose most of its long-distance cables, and its connection to North America. New Zealand would lose all of its connections except to Australia.
“The U.S. is one of the most vulnerable locations with a high risk of disconnection from Europe during extreme solar events,” the study said. “Intracontinental 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 study also looked at which regions would be vulnerable in a geomagnetic storm, and then how many internet providers were located in those region, and found that 57 per cent of internet providers would be at risk.
When it came to data centres run by web giants such as Google and Facebook, the study found that Google data centres are more spread out and largely located in countries that have cables less likely to fail, whereas Facebook’s data centres are located mostly in the northern part of the northern hemisphere.
“Owing to the limited geographic spread of data centers, Facebook will have less resilience in the event of solar superstorms,” the study said.
HOW TO PLAN
But although this all sounds scary, we have time to start the process of bolstering our infrastructure.
The study recommended we strengthen our infrastructure by doing things like laying more cables to minimize the risk of being completely cut off.
“Since links from the U.S. and Canada to Europe and Asia are highly vulnerable, adding more links to Central and South America can help in maintaining global connectivity,” the study suggested.
Planning for future data centres to be more spread out across the globe instead of clustered in northern parts of Europe and North America will also help keep the world connected in the event of a solar superstorm.
Spacecraft currently will only be able to give us 13 hours of warning if a huge CME were heading our way, the study stated. Hopefully we would’ve predicted it before then, but that’s the window in which we could be certain one was on the way.
The study suggested that in anticipation of this, we could devise a shutdown strategy to be enacted globally, that would allow us to minimize connectivity loss after the geomagnetic storm. Power grids would need to reduce or shut down completely during the storm.
In terms of internet infrastructure, we need to figure out how to protect equipment during the solar storm, and figure out how to keep service going if there is damage afterwards. Part of that is designing things that have been tested for how they would function in the event of large-scale failures, something that currently isn’t part of resilience evaluation.
“We need to rethink the network environment in the event of a partial or complete disconnection,” the study stated.
Designing a backup system that could patch together available modes of communication, using cables, satellite and wireless, could help keep things going.
It might require a lot of rethinking how we keep the world connected. But if we want the Internet Age to continue running smoothly, it might be necessary to start protecting it from the sun’s future wrath.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
