This can be happen? Midnight on 22 September 2012 and the real skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the real aurora this far south but their fascination is brief-lived.
Within several seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for just a fleeting moment. Then all what lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the real US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and what nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. What World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are struggling to pass though the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometers away on the real surface of what sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet a rare report funded by NASA and issued by what US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do exactly that it.
Over what previous couple of decades, western civilizations have busily sown the real seeds of their own destruction. Our modern lifestyle, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of what sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.
The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. "We're moving closer and closer to what fringe of a possible disaster a space weather expert based at what University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.
it is hard to conceive of the real sun wiping out a great deal of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it truly is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma - charged high-energy particles - several of which escape what surface and travel through space as what solar wind.
From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball referred to as a coronal mass ejection. If you will need to hit the real Earth's magnetic shield, what result can be considered truly devastating.
The incursion of what plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in what configuration of Earth's magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in what long wires of the real power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity.
The real greatest danger is at what step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. What increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that it saturate a transformer's magnetic core.
What result is runaway current in what transformer's copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and 6 million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that it.
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. it truly is often known as the Carrington event, after what British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was what first to notice its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a big group of sunspots. The real Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There have been eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The real world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the real scale.
Though a solar outburst could conceivably be extra powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", a head of NASA's planetary division and an authority on what events of 1859.
"From your scientific perspective, that could be the one those we'd are going to survive." However, what prognosis from the NAS analysis is those, due to our technological prowess, many people may not.
There are two problems to face. What first is the modern electricity grid, which is intended to work at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way running the real electricity networks, minimizing power losses and wastage through overproduction, these have made them much more vulnerable to space weather.
The real high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channeling enormous direct currents into what power transformers.
The second problem is the real grid's interdependence with the real systems those support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and several others all depend on electricity.
Put what two together, and it truly is clear those a repeat of the real Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the real likes of which the real world has never seen.
"It's just the opposite of how we usually visualize natural disasters, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to what NAS committee that produced the real report. "Usually the real less developed regions of the real world are most vulnerable, not what highly sophisticated technological regions."
Author Resource:
Osvaldo Salamanca is interested in the Emergency Disaster in the Future. So come and visit the latest website at http://www.2012-com.info which helps people to finding out more about How To Do The Preparation For The Prediction or Phenomenon of 2012 information if is Real or Not?
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