The earth has massive electrical fields running in it. I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of electrical discharge occurred between the ground and sky during an even that breaks conduction of said currents.
That was a minor event to everybody else. I checked the PJM power grid alerts, and they didn't issue a geomagnetic disturbance warning. Their last warning was on 11.04.2021, and it didn't reach a level that affected operations.
I agree with above commenter -- must have been some really exceptional ionosphere conditions or something!
By the way, what's the latest on the retirement/phasing out of these time signal stations? I was under the impression from years ago that they were on the way out / being defunded with some kind of decade-long timescale (in favor of GPS).
How the cable might break, obviously the pretty small explosion wouldn't break a cable but it might have been the same probable cause of the tsunami, a landslide (which has a lot of energy) -
Yep, seems like the obvious answer. Especially as these phenomenon are mostly observed near military installations and places with a lot of power generation capability.
This is alarming. Does anyone know what the current state of space weather protection/mitigation is for electricity grids in the west?
IIRC in 2012 the Earth missed a giant CME by one week, and had it hit Earth there would have been 80% casualties in the US (according to a US government committee), due to the fallout of failing electrical transformers. I'm not aware that this issue has been rectified - probably due to the magnitude of the task.
But actual power lines and other total EM pollution might be. Perhaps at some point local power use (thus LF induction) exceeded safety margins afforded by physical isolation between cables and people?
Warning of a possible CME-induced electrical storm. The visible signature alone isn't proof.
The actual EMF effects, based on both the nature and targeting of the CME, aren't clear until it encounters some electrically-aware monitoring device. Of which most are in Earth orbit.
If countermeasures include such activities as widespread disabling / disconnecting of major grid elements and equipment, you'll want to minimise the false alarms, both on the basis of cost and because of the boy-who-cried-wolf factor.
Oh, that article again. This has been discussed before, especially on Slashdot.
There are two things to worry about. One is a threat to space satellites. The other is a threat to certain long power transmission lines. There is no damage threat to ground-based electronics not attached to really long wires (many miles, longer than CO to phone loops.)
The threat to power transmission is simply that different parts of the earth temporarily have different electrical potentials at "ground". This is only an issue for long transmission lines, hundreds of miles. DC superimposed on AC causes partial transformer saturation and reduces transformer capacity. If undetected, this can burn out transmission transformers.
Since this happened in a big way in 1989, US transmission systems have added DC sensing at key points in the system, and have ways of dealing with the problem. Here's the popular explanation.[1] If you're really interested, here's the training material for the people who sit in US east coast power control rooms and decide what to do about it. Read the section on "geomagnetic disturbances"[2] If you're really, really interested, you can look up "PJM eData Guest Access" and bring up a huge Flash page which shows the current status of the east coast electrical grid. Under "Emergency actions", any current solar storm activity and related problems are mentioned. Nothing is happening today. A few times a year, there's enough solar activity that grid controllers prepare to take action. There was a moderate solar storm on June 22nd. Did you notice?
The magnetometer stuff is declination, not intensity. Direction of the field.
The electrical measurement is in 10s of microvolts per meter and was ~10 mV/m. It's hard to translate that to current since the ground impedance can vary, but it's in the milli- or microamps per meter. This is high for this kind of activity, but much lower than the limit the grid can handle.
In the bad old days a storm like this would have been enough to kill. Telegraph operators would have been exposed to kilovolts across their ears on a line 100s of km long. The ground current may a couple milliamps, but that could still cause hundreds of amps to flow.
I am dubious radiation could be the explanation here. If anything, solar storms should cause a reduction in galactic cosmic radiation ("Forbush Decrease"), which would reduce radiation at the surface, not increase it.
They should analyze devices at higher elevation or higher latitude, where radiation effects from solar protons would be more important. Also, they should consider the effect on IoT devices of voltage fluctuations on the grid.
Update: Chad Myers just confirmed a few hours later that CNN's power outage was due to a tree as GP reported and not the now G5 (from G4) geomagnetic storm. Should be fun lights in the sky tonight!
- Power systems: Possible widespread voltage control problems and some protective systems will mistakenly trip out key assets from the grid.
- Spacecraft operations: May experience surface charging and tracking problems, corrections may be needed for orientation problems.
- Other systems: Induced pipeline currents affect preventive measures, HF radio propagation sporadic, satellite navigation degraded for hours, low-frequency radio navigation disrupted, and aurora has been seen as low as Alabama and northern California (typically 45° geomagnetic lat.).
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