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Recently declassified documents suggest that in August 1972, a massive, high-velocity coronal mass ejection caused many sea mines to detonate unexpectedly. A new look is taken at the incident, taking into account more of what is known about the solar activity at the time.
The extreme space weather events of early August 1972 had significant impact on the US Navy, which have not been widely reported. These effects, long buried in the Vietnam War archives, add credence to the severity of the storm: a nearly instantaneous, unintended detonation of dozens of sea mines south of Hai Phong, North Vietnam on 4 August 1972. This event occurred near the end of the Vietnam War. The US Navy attributed the dramatic event to 'magnetic perturbations of solar storms.' In researching these events we determined that the widespread electric‐ and communication‐ grid disturbances that plagued North America and the disturbances in Southeast Asia late on 4 August likely resulted from propagation of major eruptive activity from the Sun to the Earth. The activity fits the description of a Carrington‐class storm minus the low latitude aurora reported in 1859. We provide insight into the solar, geophysical and military circumstances of this extraordinary situation. In our view this storm deserves a scientific revisit as a grand challenge for the space weather community, as it provides space‐age terrestrial observations of what was likely a Carrington‐class storm.
Given that nearly everything is almost fully dependent on electronics and those same electronics are connected to several large networks of copper wire which will act as antennas, what will we do now to mitigate the damage so we are more ready when a similar event occurs again?
From
Space Weather : On the Little‐Known Consequences of the 4 August 1972 Ultra‐Fast Coronal Mass Ejecta: Facts, Commentary and Call to Action
Science Alert : A Solar Storm Detonated Dozens of US Sea Mines, Declassified Navy Documents Reveal
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Saturday November 10 2018, @02:40PM (15 children)
Well, having lived through it, 1972 wasn't the dark ages. In the US, the country was wired for electricity (all those "large networks of copper wire"), and served by a small handful of large regional grids. Telephone networks were exclusively copper (another "large network of copper"). Every house in the US had a electronic TV, along with other bits of a nascent electronics revolution, none of which were as electrically robust as modern electronics.
Today, the electric grids are more interconnected - but their lightning / EMP protection networks are much more robust than 50 years ago. The copper telephone network is essentially dead, and what's left has mostly moved to non-conducting optical fiber for everything but the last mile. Cable TV is ubiquitous now - but once again is based on fiber backbones even though the last mile may still be copper (or may be RF in the case of satellite TV). The Internet logically wires everyone together - but is heavily wireless at this point. Even the wired networks that exist in homes / offices (Cat 5 / 6 UTP) are nearly immune to coupling this kind of interference, although it's not clear that the device connections are well protected against high common mode voltages coming in.
The world of 1972 was a much better reflection of today's world than the world of 1859; and civilization didn't end in 1972. In the modern world, you may lose a few of your iThings, but I don't expect the end of civilization to occur as a result of a CME.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday November 10 2018, @02:57PM (12 children)
The technology and infrastructure has changed so far beyond what was in use 40 years ago that the fact we survived the pulse back then is not relevant to the current situation.
The copper phone networks are sure on their way out but the old electro-mechanical phones of 1972 but they were also fairly resilent in respect to voltage surges. Today's 5V or 3.3V phones, if you have them, are quite sensitive. Every thing else seems to be connected to Ethernet and that's still copper and that usually goes throughout whole buildings if not also much of each business park or university, even with the advent of glass fiber. It'd be interesting to try to guess how many more miles / km of copper we have now than back then. But whether it is more or less, it's still a lot and can pick up a lot of charge in the right conditions. USB cables count too.
Cars and other vehicles are filled with essential components that won't tolerate a small surge either, maxing out at 3.3V DC or 5V DC.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Saturday November 10 2018, @03:39PM (3 children)
So how much energy can be coupled into a 1m USB cable? Or into an unconnected cellphone? How robust is the ESD protection on the pin of a modern IC, compared with a 1970's vintage IC? How good are 100Base-T and 1000Base-T transceivers at rejecting common-mode voltages on the order of several kV? How about the ports on your average Cisco 24-port switch?
If you don't have at least a reasonable guess on the answers to those questions, you're letting someone drive you with fear.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:48PM (2 children)
Really good in fact. Any ESD used to be a death sentence in the 70s but I've personally accidentally sent 1/2" long lightning bolts from my fingers into everything from a $1 microcontroller chip to a $5,000 sun raid card through my early career starting in the late 90s. I've never ruined anything with ESD. I do follow proper precaution when I can now especially with expensive computer gear but i've never personally had a failure despite my best attempts.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:44PM (1 child)
I've been in factories in Taiwan and China building modern laptops. It's entertaining to go by the ESD prototype test stations, where there's a person sitting there zapping every available pin on every available port 10 times in a row with an ESD gun set at 15 KV (about a 1" spark). Zap, Zap, Zap. It really gives you a much better feel for the robustness of modern electronics.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday November 11 2018, @05:18AM
That sounds much better than a while back when just touching the leads could kill the devices even if the discharge was too small to be felt. I'm quite glad there has been improvement in that area. I do still see a lot of 3.3V devices that will burnout if provided overvoltage, so the question would still be where the vulnerable equipment is being used and how pervasive it is. However, caution is different from fear. There is potential for fear mongering here while at the same time potential to avoid an unnecessary mess. It's very much about presentation and dialog I suppose.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:02PM (5 children)
Cars have terrible electrical systems compared to other environments. Pretty much anything design to go into a car is already built like a brick shithouse in expectation that the electrical system is going to be noisy and somewhat unpredictable. Not to mention the whole "EMP kills all the modern cars" meme is a great plot device, but it's also pure fiction.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:27PM (4 children)
Also I think most cars are still made of steel, which gives a great Faraday cage.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday November 11 2018, @05:15AM
One of the Only places at home I get cell reception is in my truck, in a cubby hole under the dash. That ungrounded metal cage works great as an antenna.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Monday November 12 2018, @03:54AM (2 children)
With those gigantic glass windows, it's not a Faraday cage, and probably has essentially zero affect on incoming RF.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 12 2018, @06:40AM (1 child)
I don't know about your car, but in the cars I know there are no windows into the engine bay.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Monday November 12 2018, @03:58PM
True - but the entire bottom of the engine compartment is open, along with the seams between the hood and fenders, as well as the cooling openings at the front. It's better than nothing, but not much, and might protect the ECU somewhat.
Unfortunately, the body computer (which controls unlocking the doors, communications with the key, etc) tend to be in the passenger compartment, which does have the gigantic windows...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday November 10 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
FEMA actually tested standard consumer and light duty commercial vehicles for EMP sensitivity so they could estimate the number of vehicles that would be available after a major EMP event like a nuclear bombing.
They found that 50% of modern vehicles would not start after being hit with their EMP generator. They considered the 50% failure rate to be rather good and acceptable.
The EMP sensitivity of the vehicles is drastically reduced by the fact that all car electronics requires extreme filtering already and that the vehicle body itself helps act as a Faraday cage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Tuesday November 13 2018, @03:31AM
The study I'm aware of showed most cars and trucks are pretty resilient against EMP damage. If the vehicle was not running, there was no damage at all. If the vehicle was running, the EMP blast might cause the vehicle to stop running (requiring the engine be restarted) or cause some other electrical glitches that wouldn't render the car undrivable. Only a couple of vehicles tested were damaged to the point where they needed repair. Meanwhile, there were several vehicles that were completely unaffected.
Source: http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf [empcommission.org] (see page 115)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday November 10 2018, @04:45PM
The average consumer network gear I think has no protection against common mode at all. Ethernet signaling is balanced and should be using double-ended signaling across the cable but most if not all consumer (not sure about enterprise and commercial) grade network gear lacks a balun on the physical interface and is not using double-ended signaling internally.
I know this because 100mbit network gear has harmonics right inside the ham radio 2 meter band around 145 mhz and it is extremely annoying. I have to put chokes on the cables to stop them from acting as antennas because of the unbalanced energy transfer. Those bastards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 10 2018, @05:47PM
one would think, that a downed 20kV grid "wire" is not a problem if ripped down by a back-hoe.
but just taking a step (on earth) creates a voltage difference between your left leg and your right leg and will kill you if you leave the back-hoe.
the only "safe" way is to move in hops.
i suppose with a gigantic "spot source" (a non-zero singularity?) in the sky it becomes the reason why a open-wire will test for a voltage difference between the ends ...