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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: 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)