Monster Solar Storm Could Cost US $40 Billion Daily George Dvorsky - Gizmodo
go to original January 19, 2017

Massive Solar Flare That Erupted on March 6, 2012 Gets HD Close Up (NASA Video Collection)

Our planet is due to be hit with a powerful solar storm, an event that happens about once every hundred years. New research shows that losses from the ensuing blackouts could total $41.5 billion per day in the US alone, including nearly $7 billion lost in trade.

A study published in Space Weather shows that a sufficiently powerful solar storms is capable of throwing the American economy into utter turmoil by knocking out the transformers required to transmit electricity throughout the nation’s power grids. Depending on the severity of the solar blast, the daily economic cost would be in the tens of billions of dollars, with more than half of those losses coming from indirect costs beyond immediately stricken regions.

Solar storms are space weather events in which the sun, via coronal mass ejections (CMEs), spews any number of nasties our way, including x-rays, charged particles, and magnetized plasma. Our high-tech civilization is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of these storms, which have the potential to knock out everything from handheld gadgets to the entire satellite fleet.

Our sun churns out these CMEs on a fairly regular basis, but due to their highly directional nature, our planet is often spared an ensuing geomagnetic storm. One of the more well known solar storms is the “Carrington Event” of 1859, which zapped telegraph wires, caused widespread communication outages, and even ignited the Northern Lights as far south as Mexico and Cuba. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm triggered the electrical collapse of Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid and caused a widespread blackout that lasted for about nine hours. The probability of another Carrington-like event occurring within the next decade is estimated around 12 percent.

Chart showing the blackout zones, daily customer disruptions, and daily lost in GDP, according to different scenarios (AGU)

Read the rest at Gizmodo

Related: What Would Happen if a Massive Solar Storm Hit the Earth? (Gizmodo)

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