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posted by chromas on Friday March 29 2019, @11:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the or,-you-know,-Carrington-events dept.

In what could potentially be one of the most, or least, significant actions of his term in office, President Trump Tuesday signed an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to strengthen critical infrastructure against ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks.

EMPs occur for a variety of natural and man-made reasons including, most notably, Nuclear Explosions and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), either of which could potentially take out entire sections of the country's electrical grid and other infrastructure and capabilities, requiring require years or decades to recover from.

Members and supporters of the decommissioned US Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse have long warned of the possibility of an EMP attack, with some individuals, such as Peter Pry, who previously led the congressional EMP commission, asserting that an EMP attack on America could kill off 90% of the US population.

This is because a man-made EMP has the advantage of being highly asymmetrical. A small country able to pull one off would cause potentially massive disruption to a large tech dependent country such as the United States.

Past EMP related coverage here, here and here


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Friday March 29 2019, @07:47PM (4 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday March 29 2019, @07:47PM (#821993)

    >There is no part of the Moon that doesn't face the sun...

    Certainly. Though libration has a fairly minimal effect, and a lunar day (aka lunar month) actually lasts 29.53 Earth days. 27.32 days is the time it takes for it to complete a complete rotation with respect to the stars, but it also travels roughly 1/12th of the way around the sun in the same time period, so it has to make a further 1/12 of a rotation before the sun is back to the same place in its sky.

    My point was that a CME impact is typically a brief event lasting only a few hours between when the the first and last particles hit - and that's out at Earth orbit, after the particles have been spread out by 1-3 days of traveling towards us at different speeds. The moon doesn't rotate much in that time (only about 1.5 degrees), so the CME would only hit the side currently facing the sun.

    To hit all parts of the surface for even a few moments the CME impact would need to last almost 15 days, and then the impact would be very uneven, in a very distinctive pattern: the strip of the moon at the dawn-line when the leading edge hit (and just reaching nightfall when it was over) would have been bombarded for 15 straight days, while the strip that only caught the leading edge at nightfall, and then the tail end at dawn only gets a few minutes. To get a uniform effect the impact would have to last for a full 29.5 days, so that all parts of the moon were exposed to an equal amount of it.

    I'm not sure it's even physically possible for a CME impact to last for even two weeks - that would imply that the "explosion" was an ongoing event that had lasted roughly that long on the sun. Plus, since the sun spins once every 27 days, in order for that miraculously sustained stream of plasma to stay focused on us, the eruption would have to travel more than half way around the sun's surface in near-perfect synchronization with the Earth while it was happening, otherwise the "impact" would be spread around 1/2 of the Earth's orbit, and we'd pass only be hit by a tiny portion of it as it swept across us like a lighthouse.

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 29 2019, @08:57PM (3 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday March 29 2019, @08:57PM (#822028) Journal

    Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. I'd read the parents above you and couldn't quite put it all together... Could it not be a series of CME's (or, far more possible, impacts) over hundreds of thousands of years? (Not one event but many taking place all around the rotative phases?) Or a roast on one side and then a million years later a roast on the other? One might not get uniformity but rather a coat all over? I'm not saying I buy that at all, just exploring the possibility.

    The other thing I wouldn't get is why wouldn't it be the volcanic action (if one accepts the impactor-volcanic theory) which created the glass - not just impacts alone. But the timing would be all wrong to glass over just the last 30,000 years as that era was done in the millions of years ago IIRC.

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    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 29 2019, @09:12PM (2 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday March 29 2019, @09:12PM (#822037)

      Sure, lots of bursts are possible.

      My biggest objection is with the idea that glass inside craters is evidence of solar activity, when craters would be the least impacted areas by a solar event. Unless perhaps they're talking about glass that was buried by dust and then later exposed when new craters were formed.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:23PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:23PM (#822100)

        craters would be the least impacted areas by a solar even

        They say "For radiative heating from a small angular source in the sky the bottoms of craters are substantially favored." You are ignoring geometry (it gets warmer in a crater for the same reason it is colder at poles than the equator).

      • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 29 2019, @11:29PM

        by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday March 29 2019, @11:29PM (#822104) Journal

        True, and as you mentioned there would be unevenness due to crater shadow.

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