EMP: : One Day We Will Wake Up Without Electricity And Society Will Collapse

[The Brain]

No need to be a pessimist, just try to make sure that you're part of the 10% that survives. It might seem hard if you don't have a useful post-apocalypse skill, but all you really need is a rifle and a strong stomach.

[Edit: Would cars work in this scenario?]

they require electricity to start, so no.

I think it's primarily electronics that's damaged by EMP.

[Alcibiades]

The "threat" i always see used is an enemy detonating several nukes in the atmosphere above the US wiping out everything.

The book One Second After is a pretty interesting fictional novel on what could happen.  In the book everything electronic gets fried so nothing works, cars, public works, etc.  Food doesn't get delivered and people start to starve, 50% of the American people on meds die, all the old people die, all the fat people die from heart attacks/high cholesterol, Roving criminals start taking what they want without law enforcement to stop them, etc. Was interesting.


http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765356864

Okay, but I was referring to real stuff, not novels.  Nukes in the upper atmosphere wouldn't much effect vehicles, for instance, because they are metal and EMP stops when it hits metal (lots of buildings would be safe, too).  Plus, the EMP bursts are too short to rally build up high voltages at anything but short ranges.  An enemy that used all their nukes to get upper-atmosphere bursts to knock out US electronics would be vaporized by the US response (which wouldn't be aiming at getting an EMP effect, but more like the glass effect).  Then, the US imports some trons from China or Europe, and life goes on.

Yeah, I don't know the science of it, just what I've read in articles and that book.  If that's true then it allays a lot of potential problems.   

[grumbler]

I think it's primarily electronics that's damaged by EMP.

Electronics because, though they have very short pathways, they are very sensitive to excessive voltage.   The transformers associated with high-voltage electrical transmission lines because, while they are not very sensitive to excessive voltage, they are attached to what amounts to very large antennae that capture a lot of voltage.

Car electronics are not very vulnerable because they are inside metal cages.

[Berkut]

Modern cars, however, are not nearly as metal as they used to be - my Subaru, for example, has a metal frame but the body panels are some kind of plastic.

This is the standard exaggeration of a threat to get people all worked up, but the threat itself does exist. A high altitude EMP weapon could have very damaging effects on infrastructure. The part that I think is kind of silly in the doomsday scenarios is the idea that the damage would somehow be impossible to recover from, like all humans will just become helpless to figure out how to adapt and repair the damage.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Modern cars, however, are not nearly as metal as they used to be - my Subaru, for example, has a metal frame but the body panels are some kind of plastic.

There is still a good amount of metal in the engine compartment, where most of the sensitive and critical electronics sit.  You might lose some convenience accessories in the passenger cabin, but the ignition and timing systems should be fine.

This is the standard exaggeration of a threat to get people all worked up, but the threat itself does exist. A high altitude EMP weapon could have very damaging effects on infrastructure. The part that I think is kind of silly in the doomsday scenarios is the idea that the damage would somehow be impossible to recover from, like all humans will just become helpless to figure out how to adapt and repair the damage.

It's one of those things that the average person doesn't know enough detail about and has been trumped up in lots of fiction over the decades.  It makes for a convenient way to selectively cripple technology as a plot device, but the reality is not nearly as scary or dangerous as is frequently portrayed.

[Berkut]

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf

[grumbler]

Modern cars, however, are not nearly as metal as they used to be - my Subaru, for example, has a metal frame but the body panels are some kind of plastic.

True.  The less metal there is, the further from the source of the EMP the car will be affected.

This is the standard exaggeration of a threat to get people all worked up, but the threat itself does exist. A high altitude EMP weapon could have very damaging effects on infrastructure. The part that I think is kind of silly in the doomsday scenarios is the idea that the damage would somehow be impossible to recover from, like all humans will just become helpless to figure out how to adapt and repair the damage.

Also true, and the fearmongers ignore the fact that every lightning bolt is a source of EMP, so it's not like EMP is some mysterious force that we never see except in the doomsday scenarios.  Surge protectors are there to protect against lightning-induced EMP in the electrical lines far more than against direct lightning strikes on the power lines.

[Razgovory]

Since Grumbler is not responding to me and I have a serious question for him would someone ask it for me?


I know Grumbler served on panels in the Navy regarding logistics and some science related issues.  I would to know if he dealt with the issue of EMPs while working in the Navy.

[The Brain]

Since Grumbler is not responding to me and I have a serious question for him would someone ask it for me?


I know Grumbler served on panels in the Navy regarding logistics and some science related issues.  I would to know if he dealt with the issue of EMPs while working in the Navy.

yw

[jimmy olsen]

DOOM grows ever more likely.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/11/09/solar_storms_new_evidence_that_the_sun_twice_erupted_violently_in_the_middle.html

When the Sun Went Medieval on Our Planet

In the years 774 and 993 AD, the Earth was attacked from space.

Not by aliens, but by a natural event — and it was very, very powerful.

Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet's atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have been from space.

These must have been huge waves of subatomic particles that slammed into us on those dates. Spikes in the abundances of those elements were found all over the world, including ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic, Chinese corals, and more. Generating that many particles isn't easy, and only extremely violent events can do it.

Several possible sources have been considered. One candidate is that the Earth got caught in the beam from a gamma-ray burst, the mind-crushingly powerful demise of a very high mass star. I wrote about this being the possible cause of the 774 event in an earlier article. However, GRB impacts don't usually create 10Be due to the detailed physics of the blast, so that makes a GRB as the source shaky. Plus, they're very rare events, so having two happen in as many centuries is extremely unlikely (I didn't know about the 993 AD event when I wrote that article, or else I would've been a lot more likely to wonder about other sources).

New research studying the amounts of these radioactive materials in ice cores points to a different culprit, one I wouldn't have thought possible: the Sun.

The Sun generates ridiculously strong magnetic fields in its interior, and these can store vast amounts of energy. They can release this energy explosively on the surface, creating intense solar flares. Sometimes the loops of magnetism do this far above the Sun's surface, creating what are called coronal mass ejections. These are less intense (that is, less concentrated bursts of energy) than flares, but far larger and more powerful; think of flares versus CMEs like solar tornadoes versus hurricanes.

You can find out more about these events in the Crash Course Astronomy episode I did on the Sun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qik5bcHCGxU

I also have a chapter in my book Death from the Skies! about solar storms and their effects on Earth.

When I wrote about the 774 AD event on this blog before, I mentioned that a flare or coronal mass ejection was unlikely to be the source due to the amount of energy needed to create these radioactive elements. However, that new research indicates that the Sun is the most likely culprit for this interplanetary assault, and that, in turn, means the Sun can produce more powerful events than we previously thought.

Yikes.

We've known for a long time that the Sun is capable of producing huge magnetic explosions. In 2003 it let rip a series of solar storms so powerful that one of them set the record for the biggest flare seen in modern times. And the strongest known was also very first solar explosion ever seen — called the Carrington Event, after an astronomer who studied it — happened in 1859. It created aurora as far south as Mexico and Hawaii! Events like that can also create what are called geomagnetically induced currents (GICs): The Earth's magnetic field shakes so violently that it induces currents in conductors on the ground. Telegraph operators reported being able to send messages even though the power was disconnected; enough electricity was flowing through the lines to work the devices.

There's more. In 2012 the Sun blew out another blockbuster that was in many ways the equal of the one in 1859, but happily for us it was sent off in another direction, and missed the Earth. Had it hit us, the huge flux of charged particles would have overloaded satellites. Worse, the GIC would've caused widespread power failures and blackouts. A much smaller solar storm in 1989 did just that in Quebec.

It's not clear if the 774 and 993 events were that powerful or more; it's hard to scale these things without direct measurements. But the astronomers who did the research estimate the 774 event (the more powerful of the pair) was five times stronger than any solar storm seen in the modern satellite era (starting in 1956) up to 2005.
I'll admit, that's scary. Our modern civilization depends on our electronic devices, and those in turn depend on electricity and satellites. A blast hitting the Earth from a storm as big as any of those four historical events would be bad. Very bad. The 1989 power surge blew out huge transformers in North America, and these can take months to replace. Imagine months without electricity, and you start to get an idea of how disastrous this can be.

We don't know how often the Sun throws a tantrum as large as these, but clearly it's done so at least four times in the past millennium or so — probably more, since three of them hit the Earth, and we only knew of the fourth due to our space-based astronomical assets. Statistically speaking, most will miss us, so they're likely more common than we thought.

This is a threat we need to take very seriously. Unfortunately, it's extremely expensive to mitigate. Our power grid in the US was constructed decades ago when our use of electricity was much lower. It was designed with lots of spare room for more power flowing through it, but over the years our appetite has grown, and the grid is currently very nearly at capacity. Big spikes now can cripple huge areas.

We need to upgrade the grid, add more capacity, more capability to handle surges induced by solar storms. The good news is there are studies being done to see what we can do to prevent widespread blackouts, and NASA is on it as well. We also have eyes on the Sun, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, and scientists monitor "space weather" constantly. 

By coincidence, just last night I read that the White House is looking into this situation pretty seriously, and I'm very glad to hear it. A monster solar storm may be the biggest and most immediate threat there is from space, but it's one we can handle if we're prepared for it.

[garbon]

Glad to see you are now copying in pasting the correct links.

[Razgovory]

One article from Slate is as good as another.

[jimmy olsen]

Glad to see you are now copying in pasting the correct links.

The Bad Astronomy blog is well regarded

Edit: Noticed the issue, fixed.

[mongers]

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

[Eddie Teach]

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

I just have one thing to add.


LEONARD BERNSTEIN!