Scientists Warn - Huge Solar Storm Threat 2012

This was an interesting article. Ya'll might find it interesting.
Once again the year 2012 is popping up. This time it's in the
form of a giant killer solar storm.

www.stevequayle.com...

Exerpt coming ...

May 4, 2006
Discovery Channel, Canada

As the world scrambles to prepare for hurricanes and earthquakes of
unprecedented strength, some scientists say the sun poses an equal threat,
with predictions calling for a 2012 sun storm of immense proportions.

If the idea of a solar storm sounds too much like the stuff of sci-fi, consider this:
a single large solar flare has a million times more energy than the largest
earthquake, according to Space.com.

Last month, experts convened in Colorado during Space Weather Week (April 25
-28) to discuss the issues surrounding the approaching 2012 event. If the storm
turns out to be at the same scale as the one in 1859, economic disaster would
ensue, with immediate costs around the $20 billion mark.

More info here -
reports.discoverychannel.ca...

and here -
www.stevequayle.com...

ATS discussion on solar storm event for 2011 -
(which I think all this could be related to)
www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 5/15/2006 by FlyersFan]

"A solar superstorm could also:

force about 100 low Earth-orbiting spacecraft to undergo earlier-than-normal reentry

disrupt Global Positioning Systems the world over

force the International Space Station to lose altitude."

I can live with this. Doesn't say anything about baking our flesh, cooking our planet or evaporating the ocean. Now that would suck!

Well, this doesnt make our future look too rosey, does it?!

I'll bet its the catastrophe we do not anticipate that will get us. I wonder what that could be?
Is there anything else left?

This all makes the book of Revelations look like Alice in Wonderland.

Originally posted by dgtempe
I wonder what that could be?
Is there anything else left?
This all makes the book of Revelations look like Alice in Wonderland.

It's gonna be a comet or a meteor....or some Planet X type scenario.
Something is gonna doa fly-by and fry us a like a baked chestnut. The earth's gonna pop open all over (volcanoes/earthquakes) gushing lava. Cotinents are gonna sink. New ones will arise. It's the only way this earth can truly be cleansed. Think about it......plus, if you believe in Revelations you know something is gonna hit us from the skies. It mentions something pulling back the sky....only a huge comet could magnetically pull our atmosphere away.

$20 Billion only???
Isn't the Iraq war up to some $400 Billion by now. Peanuts.

Originally posted by mecheng
$20 Billion only???
Isn't the Iraq war up to some $400 Billion by now. Peanuts.

You're more tired than you imagine. Wrong thread?

Originally posted by zerotolerance
It mentions something pulling back the sky....only a huge comet could magnetically pull our atmosphere away.

The ions from the solar flare carry a charge. Even with the normal solar wind, some of the Earth's magnetic field gets torn away. A really large blast could just break through it.

Originally posted by dgtempe

You're more tired than you imagine. Wrong thread?

FlyersFan's cource states that there would be $20 billion in immediate damage.

And don't worry folks, as there is only a slime chance of something that bad happening.

Yeah. I was refering the the relative cost - $400 billion for the war vs. a mere $20 billion for a global catastrophe like this.

I am really tired though.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
FlyersFan's cource states that there would be $20 billion in immediate damage.

I thought that number was odd. The source didn't really say how they
came up with that number. If a huge solar flare ran amuk against the
earth, I would think that number would be MUCH MUCH higher.

20 billion $$$ doesn't go to far these days. Electronics .... stock crashes
.... stuff in space ..... medical equipment and cell phones .....

Originally posted by mecheng
Yeah. I was refering the the relative cost - $400 billion for the war vs. a mere $20 billion for a global catastrophe like this.

Yeah, it's amazing isn't it? We focus so much time, money and effort onto killing each other, while putting so little of those three into things that can save our lives.

Originally posted by FlyersFan
I thought that number was odd. The source didn't really say how they
came up with that number. If a huge solar flare ran amuk against the
earth, I would think that number would be MUCH MUCH higher.

20 billion $$$ doesn't go to far these days. Electronics .... stock crashes
.... stuff in space ..... medical equipment and cell phones .....

Not really. There would be, at the worst, a couple of hours of time to say this was coming. It would start by shutting down everything. Very little damage could be done to things on Earth if there was no elecricity running though them. I doubt a stock crash would result from this, though they may make the market close early.

The damage would really play into, like you said, things in space and medical equipment (or anything else that can't easily be shut off). Stuff in space could be shut down or put into sleep mode after put into a lower orbit (if that's possible), but I doubt that all the corporations and space centers could save the thousands of satellites that are up there. They would, no doubt, prioritize for the more important (read: expensive) ones though, cutting the cost down a bit.

What transpired during the dog days of summer 1859, across the 150 million-kilometer (about 93 million-mile) chasm of interplanetary space that separates the Sun and Earth, was this: on August 28, solar observers noted the development of numerous sunspots on the Sun's surface. Sunspots are localized regions of extremely intense magnetic fields. These magnetic fields intertwine, and the resulting magnetic energy can generate a sudden, violent release of energy called a solar flare. From August 28 to September 2 several solar flares were observed. Then, on September 1, the Sun released a mammoth solar flare. For almost an entire minute the amount of sunlight the Sun produced at the region of the flare actually doubled.

"With the flare came this explosive release of a massive cloud of magnetically charged plasma called a coronal mass ejection," said Tsurutani. "Not all coronal mass ejections head toward Earth. Those that do usually take three to four days to get here. This one took all of 17 hours and 40 minutes," he noted.
science.nasa.gov...

This storm brought down all telegragh communication for several days. But this was 1859 and they had no electronics to worry about. The same story goes on to give a few examples of smaller solar storms that have effected us more recently.

Back in 1859 the invention of the telegraph was only 15 years old and society's electrical framework was truly in its infancy. A 1994 solar storm caused major malfunctions to two communications satellites, disrupting newspaper, network television and nationwide radio service throughout Canada. Other storms have affected systems ranging from cell phone service and TV signals to GPS systems and electrical power grids. In March 1989, a solar storm much less intense than the perfect space storm of 1859 caused the Hydro-Quebec (Canada) power grid to go down for over nine hours, and the resulting damages and loss in revenue were estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

So this is a real threat to the planet if it occurs during the next solarmax.
But we'd all get to witness the greatest arora display in our life time. That's something to look forward to anyway...........



And even if there is a perfect storm in 2012, it may not even be aimed at the Earth, the Sun has a very large surface and most storms don't come in our direction.

If devices aren't connected to surge protectors, it could be really bad. What would happen if everything went down, then came back up at once. There was a weekend where all of the power was shut down in my office, then turned back on. We had a devices that weren't plugged into a surge protector, and the things just stopped.
www.pcsecuritynews.com...
Imagine all the people/companies that didn't think to plug their stuff into APCs or surge protectors?

Originally posted by anxietydisorder
This storm brought down all telegragh communication for several days. But this was 1859 and they had no electronics to worry about. The same story goes on to give a few examples of smaller solar storms that have effected us more recently.

Like back in 1989 when a solar flare overloaded a power system in Quebec, Canada, causing regionwide black outs. More on that can be found here.

The sun has been quiet lately, but this could be the calm before the storm. I found the following paper describing what would happen if an 1859 storm hit earth and since we are nearing solar maximum in 2012, I have a little tidbit from the article . . . very scarry!

" . . .The Great Solar Storm of September 1859, if it were to reoccur today, has the potential of simultaneously damaging our electrical infrastructure in the East and West Coast of the United States and the power grids along the northern tier of States. This could produce an unexpected longduration electrical power blackout affecting approximately 50% of the U.S. population. This type of massive storm would also affect high latitude and mid-latitude countries in both the northern and southern hemisphere, such as Europe, Central Asia, Russia, Canada, China, New Zealand, and South America (Southern Argentina & Chile). As the crisis evolves, partial restoration will likely occur and hard blackouts will transition to rolling blackouts and brownouts. This is the primary nature of the global threat. Herein lies the danger! Our society is technology driven and technology dependent. Without electrical power, the modern world will come crashing down.

Should this threat materialize, I also expect the crisis would quickly elevate to the level of a national imperative. All available expertise, manpower, equipment and facilities would be brought to bear to fabricate and install key damaged infrastructure elements and move the electrical power grid back into operational status. Normally one might expect a year or two to replace this equipment but under a concerted effort and governmental mandate, I believe the damaged infrastructure could be resolved in the order of weeks rather than in years. . ."

The full paper can be found at the following link:

1859 What If Scenario Paper!



[edit on 9/2/07 by mel1962]

Nice to hear some scientific facts. I am basicaly interested in Sitchin's work. Of course I take everything he says with a huge amount of salt but he is right in one thing. There is no God basically everything is a remake of old scriptures which kept people in tribes in the old times. I mean look at the middle east where they believe in God. They starve to death and let other people live in palaces because God wants this to be. God is a big deception conceived to control peope. This is it. 2012 wont be a date of any spiritual leverage or change, simply because there is not such a thing. Maybe this solar storm will happen. I hate this seeing happen since some very expensive equipment will be toasted if it is big.

Anyway talking about sitchin's work one can understand how we came to believe in celestial Gods. For instance I am a Christian. The big rise to the heavens of Jesus and Mary was also written way before that. Gods went into the heavens. We are all mortal we live and die and we get lost this is the tragedy we have to live with and of course die with. I just hope we continue to exist as a human race and not a big catastrophe happens, it will be a pity seeing all the progress we have done get lost. Do not make your mind go crazy everything is written thousands of years ago, if something is going to happen it will happen, no divine intervention. Do not believe in crazy people who are telling things about the end of the world. Believe only facts. If there is a mechanism that a catastrophe will happen that we can not predict so be it. It will be a pity though.

I had posted this article in the crop circle threads since there has been mention that the recent formations are warnings about solar flares and storms. It talks about how there are cracks in the magnetic field that can cause solar storms to have higher than normal consequences:

news.nationalgeographic.com...

NASA site:

science.nasa.gov...

reply to post by CINY8


Thanks for the National Geographic link. I found it interesting. I like seeing facts or at least a plausible scenario that is based on logic.

This is quite a scenario, kind of creepy if this were to happen.

www.newscientist.com...

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster," says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see "When hell comes to Earth"). If one should hit the Earth's magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer's magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.....*SNIP*

reply to post by TM62


Lets hope that this scenario does not happen.
If we manage to escape the economic crisis that some stupid greedy people got us into we are going to go just "well". In quotations of course, because "we" the developed, or under development countries are going to go just well. There exist countries in the world where people suffer because some people want this to be. It is the way things are. Again it is like the ancient times when people also had to suffer in order for some other people to live prosperous. I am beginning seriously to think that Sitchin is right. If we were made "to look and do like him" why do we do such things? Are we doing exactly what some other race did? If we were like "Him" we would be now in complete harmony. Everything is a lie but I can live with this lie, it is a nice fairytale. It keeps chaos from spreading.

Anyway:
It will be a pity seeing our source of light and life give us darkness and death. Thanks for sharing these interesting links.

reply to post by ATSmember


It is so true, if it isn't man made, it will be sent from the heavens. We can only take it one day at a time I suppose, who knows what tomorrow will bring. Hopefully the good things in life, family, friends and good health. Nothing else really matters. Okay I guess you need air, water, and food....but nothing else matters..wait, wait a minute..I need smokes and pepsi and steak, I love steak and ribs...okay sorry for the ramblings, there are things that I would like to NOT live without as well. It's Monday I must have a sense of humor I'm at work!