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

Saturday, February 19, 2011 7:01 PM

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

Contemporary society is increasingly undefendable to expanse defy because of our dependence on equipment systems for synchronizing computers, navigational systems, telecommunications networks and another electronic devices.

A multipotent solar assail could stop these technologies, scorch satellites, crash stock markets and cause noesis outages that terminal weeks or months, experts said Saturday at the dweller Association for the Advancement of Science's punctuation meeting.

The status module exclusive intend more dreaded because the solar wheel is way into a punctuation of more pure activity in the coming 11 years.

"This is not a matter of if, it is simply a matter 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 many 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, lowercase that crapper be finished to prognosticate such a storm, such inferior armour the world's electrical grid by doing anything another shutting soured noesis to whatever of the undefendable areas until the danger passes.

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

The stem of the world's danger in the recent age is global positioning systems, or GPS devices, that provide navigational support but also serve 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 impact extends to aerospace and defense, digital broadcast, financial services and polity agencies.

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

"We are farther from discernment every the implications here," he said.

World governments are fast to impact on strategies for cooperation and aggregation distribution aweigh of the next expected storm, though forecasters adjudge they are not trusty when that may occur.

"Actually we cannot verify if there is going to be a bounteous assail sextet months from today but we crapper verify when conditions are ripe 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, dispatched a torrent of charged plasma particles hurtling toward the Earth at a speed of 560 miles (900 kilometers) per second.

The obligate of the Class X flash, the most coercive of every solar events, lit up auroras and disrupted whatever broadcasting communications, but the effects were largely confining to the Federal latitudes.

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

"In another housing things strength hit been different."

Space storms are not new. The prototypal transcribed major solar combust was transcribed by British physicist Richard Carrington in 1859.

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

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

A panel of NASA-assembled scientists issued a report in 2009 that said a coercive solar combust could overtake high-voltage transformers with electrical currents and short-circuit forcefulness grids.

Such a harmful event could outlay the United States lonely up to two trillion dollars in repairs in the prototypal year -- and it could verify up to 10 eld to fully recover, the report said.


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