Solar Flares: What You Need to Know: A Special from Tarcher/Penguin
Whitley Strieber
Language: English
Pages: 43
ISBN: B009VMBTTE
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
There is a force out there that could destroy our world in minutes. . . .
Solar flares—brief bursts of radiation from our sun—have always existed and have never been particularly dangerous. Nature hasn’t changed. But we have. By making our world so dependent on electricity delivered by huge, unprotected power grids we have inadvertently placed humanity at terrible risk. As bestselling author Whitley Strieber explores in this urgent new work, a powerful solar flare could demolish our electrical delivery system, wiping away centuries of civilization in minutes and drastically changing our world.
Such a scenario is altogether plausible—and it is the single most dangerous single thing that could happen to our civilization, more dangerous than the most massive earthquake or volcano, more dangerous than climate change, more dangerous even than nuclear war. What is worse, solar flares of a now-dangerous intensity are not all that uncommon; and not only that, our electrical and electronic infrastructure is becoming so extensive, and thus so fragile, that smaller and smaller solar flares can pose more and more serious hazards.
Due to the astonishing unwillingness of power companies to cooperate, good programs that would make us safer, and that are supported by both political parties, have been routinely prevented from being enacted.
In Solar Flares: What You Need to Know, Strieber reveals the dangers behind solar flares, tracks the disastrous damage they could cause, surveys what they would do to our world in the here-and-now, and explains what nations and individuals must do to prepare for them.
almost certainly dwarfed those of the Carrington Event. There would have been profound damage to our electrical and electronic infrastructure. As matters stood, it caused an R-5 radio blackout, the most intense radio disruption event on the R-scale, which is a measure of the extent and intensity of radio blackouts. The longer the duration of the event and the more parts of the radio band it touches, the higher the R-level. Radio transmissions were impossible across wide areas of the earth during
America, and is seen from Greenland to the Channel Islands off the coast of California, indicating that the carbon and soot in it must have come from vast fires, literally transcontinental in scope. No fossils of Pleistocene megafauna, such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, have ever been found above the black mat. Similarly, all remains of the Clovis culture, which was the Indian culture that inhabited North America prior to the appearance of the black mat, lie below it. Above it, there
they contain energetic particles, coronal mass ejections do not travel at the speed of light. If they did, they would reach Earth in just eight minutes. This is fortunate, because we see the light of a flare some time before the arrival of its serious energy blast. This warning can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on the strength of the solar eruption and whether or not previous eruptions have cleared the magnetic atmosphere between the earth and the sun. Once a flare is
independently observed the massive flare. Prior to the 2003 event, it is believed to have been the most intense solar storm in the past five hundred years. Could the sun conceivably generate another Carrington Event? At the conclusion of the 2008 meeting, there was general agreement that the sun was acting in some unexpected ways, and clearly more research was urgently needed. Prior to the meeting, there had been that worrisome event in 2003. The huge solar flare that appeared then was
through it for another ten thousand to twenty thousand years. There are two reasons this is important. First, we are entering a denser part of it than has ever been the case before. The effects of this can be seen in the unusual storms that have been observed in the Voyager spacecraft data, affecting the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and even causing bursts of high-energy plasma to arc between these planets and some of their moons. Russian space scientist Alexei