Transcription
Good afternoon folks. There is one goal in this video, and that is to communicate a critical and often misunderstood fact about solar storm effects.
First, it is true that in a super flare, a super solar storm, the energy induction can hit everything, take out everything. But that is definitely not the most common scenario. More often, it is a smaller storm and a concentration of energy, very concentrated focus, actually.
In recent videos about solar storm effects, I keep seeing comments like these, which tell me the people know absolutely nothing about space weather. They'll say things like, "No, the whole city or the whole internet would be out if the sun caused that problem," or they're incredulous about only some few things taking the hit from the solar storm. That is, in fact, exactly what you would expect and is the most common solar storm effect.
When large areas take a blackout during a solar storm, it usually isn't because every circuit was destroyed in the blackout area. It's usually one transformer got hit, or a substation, or a generator, and that caused what electrical engineers call a cascade of failures, not from the solar storm, but from the one that failed due to the solar storm. That's what was true in the Quebec blackout of 1989 and in Norway and Sweden in the 2003 blackouts.
Satellites don't explode when they fail from solar storms. They have one component inside them that fails, and often it is only one or two satellites that take the hit. The 40 Starlink satellites that failed in the 2022 storm was actually a very rare, high multitude. When networks fail, we wouldn't expect the entire internet to go down, just the systems critically connected to the network that failed. Best example was in 2015 when four airlines simultaneously had their systems crash, several airport air traffic controls as well, but while the rest, the majority, had no problems.
If your head is fully immersed in the total failure scenario of a super flare like the Carrington event, that is understandable. But at most solar storm levels, that's not going to be the case. Random areas of the world take it the worst, and random vulnerable items as well. This is true during the initial impact where not every global electric circuit, vertical current, takes an equal surge. And that is even more selective in the aftermath when the ionospheric energy is transferred downward. It can take out four neighborhoods and the next street over things can be just fine. It could hit a large ship on a conductive river and the lights of the city on either side of the river may never even flicker.
Get your head around this. Now, we're going to be getting a lot more of these recent events in the coming years. And if your head isn't screwed on straight on this critical fact about solar storm selectivity, when it's not a global kill shot level storm, you're going to be in the dark, like the systems that do take the impact. I'll see in the morning for The Daily Show. Be safe, everyone.