Space Storm Could Black Out US East Coast for Two Years
Severe space "weather" can knock out satellite communications and GPS systems, expose space tourists and astronauts to dangerous levels of radiation, and even cause massive blackouts on Earth that could last up to two years, scientists and NASA officials warned. A sun storm on the scale of one that happened in 1859, which was recorded by British brewer and amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, would potentially have sweeping consequences on huge population clusters in the United States, experts at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum said. "The United States population that is at risk of an extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20-40 million, with an outage duration of possibly 16 days to one to two years," said Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space and now the acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which hosted Tuesday's conference. "The highest risk of storm-induced outages of these magnitudes in the United States is between Washington DC and New York City," she said, citing a report released last month by global insurance giant Lloyd's of London, which urged businesses to "think about their exposure to space weather." But the Carrington super-storm also sent a mammoth cloud of charged particles and detached magnetic loops - a "coronal mass ejection" - crashing into Earth's magnetic field, where it caused a geomagnetic storm that severely disrupted the telegraph system, which in the late 1800s was communications' equivalent of the Internet today.
