Space weather could wreak havoc in gadget-driven world (AFP)

Sunday, February 20, 2011 5:01 PM By dwi

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A geomagnetic expanse assail sparked by a solar activity same the one that flared toward Earth weekday is extremity to accomplish again and could wreak disturbance across the gadget-happy past world, experts say.

Contemporary gild is progressively vulnerable to expanse defy because of our dependency on equipment systems for synchronizing computers, line navigation, telecommunications networks and added electronic devices.

A potent solar assail could stop these technologies, burn satellites, break stock markets and cause noesis outages that terminal weeks or months, experts said Sat at the dweller Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting.

The situation module only get more dire because the solar wheel is heading into a period of more intense activity in the coming 11 years.

"This is not a concern of if, it is simply a concern of when and how big," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco.

"The terminal instance we had a peak in the solar cycle, most 10 eld ago, the world was a very assorted place. Cell phones are today ubiquitous; they were certainly around (before) but we didn't rely on them for so whatever assorted things," she said.

"Many things that we verify for acknowledged today are so such more unerect to the process of expanse defy than was the housing in the terminal solar maximum."

The experts admitted that currently, little that can be finished to prognosticate such a storm, such less shield the world's electrical installation by doing anything added shutting soured noesis to whatever of the vulnerable areas until the danger passes.

"Please don't panic," said Stephan Lechner, administrator of the dweller Commission Joint Research Center, drawing laughter from the scientists and journalists in the audience. "Overreaction module attain the situation worse."

The stem of the world's danger in the past geezerhood is global orientating systems, or GPS devices, that wage navigational help but also help as instance synchronizers for machine networks and electronic equipment, he said.

"GPS helped and created a newborn dependency," said Lechner, noting that the technology's influence extends to aerospace and defense, digital broadcast, financial services and government agencies.

In aggregation alone, there are 200 removed medium operators, and "nothing is standardized," he said.

"We are farther from understanding all the implications here," he said.

World governments are hurrying to impact on strategies for cooperation and information distribution aweigh of the incoming anticipated storm, though forecasters admit they are not sure when that haw occur.

"Actually we cannot verify if there is feat to be a bounteous assail sextet months from today but we can verify when conditions are ripened for a assail to verify place," said the dweller Space Agency's Juha-Pekka Luntama.

On weekday at 0156 GMT, a Brobdingnagian solar eruption, the strongest in most fivesome years, sent a torrent of charged plasma particles hurtling toward the Earth at a pace of 560 miles (900 kilometers) per second.

The obligate of the Class X flash, the most coercive of all solar events, lit up auroras and disrupted whatever broadcasting communications, but the effects were mostly confined to the northern latitudes.

"Actually it overturned discover that we were substantially fortified this time. The magnetic fields were aligned nonconvergent so not such happened," said Luntama.

"In added housing things might hit been different."

Space storms are not new. The first field solar combust was transcribed by nation physicist Richard Carrington in 1859.

Other solar geomagnetic storms hit been observed in past decades. One Brobdingnagian solar combust in 1972 revilement soured long-distance ring act in the midwestern land of Illinois, NASA said.

Another similar combust in 1989 "provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted automobile noesis transmission" and caused blackouts across the Canadian province of Quebec, the US expanse authority said.

A commission of NASA-assembled scientists issued a inform in 2009 that said a coercive solar combust could overwhelm high-voltage transformers with electrical currents and short-circuit energy grids.

Such a catastrophic circumstance could cost the United States lonely up to digit 1E+12 dollars in repairs in the first assemblage -- and it could verify up to 10 eld to fully recover, the inform said.


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