Solar superstorms could trigger major economic crisis

No wonder the Sun is considered a deity in many prehistoric cultures. The word "Sunday" comes from the day of the Sun god in ancient Roman culture.

Without the Sun, life on Earth would not have existed. The Earth's rotation and orbit around the Sun is the basis of the solar calendar and the reason seasons exist. Its warmth and light fills our days and we all look forward to its dawn and feel melancholic when the Sun is setting; however, our hope for its eventual rise is firm.

It should be, the Sun has been in this current state and stability for more than 4 billion years and it will remain fairly so for another five billion years.

On the other hand, solar flares are something quite different: unpredictable and sometimes quite scary. A solar flare is a sudden flash of brightness observed near the surface of the Sun. It creates significant energy emissions and a typical, observable solar flare up to a billion megatons of TNT. This energy level is unthinkable and unimaginable in earth terms, so I will not try to describe it for you.

Luckily, solar flares mostly stay effective on the surface of the Sun; however, sometimes they create "coronal mass ejections" that reach Earth in one to two days. Vast amounts of of matter and electromagnetic radiation leave the Sun and reach Earth and other planets, even going beyond the solar system.

On July 23, 2012, a massive solar flare barely missed Earth, according to NASA, and another one is expected to come close in 10 years, despite the low probability (less than 1 in 8 chance). Large scale solar flares could easily damage airplanes and satellites, it could even kill astronauts, and we would not have much time to prepare.

To illustrate, a powerful solar flare on Sept. 1, 1859, which is also known as the Carrington Event, induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record. As opposed to the 2012 solar flare, the 1859 event actually hit Earth. If one were to happen today, its effects would be unbelievably catastrophic. In 1859, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks!

A repeat of this phenomenon today could be quite disastrous for the world economies.

A recent study and resulting report by Space Weather estimates the projected damage of a massive solar flare. First of all, it will destroy the electrical transformers of the power grids, very likely causing global blackouts. The report attempts to quantify the daily economic losses caused by a sufficiently powerful solar flare. They estimate that the effects on the U.S. economy would be somewhere between 6 billion and 40 billion dollars a day, depending on the size of the solar storm.

No power grid in the world - including the U.S. - is designed to handle a massive solar superstorm, nor do they contain the safeguards that would protect it. Systems that require heavy use of high-voltage, low-resistance power lines with transmission voltages from 200 to 700 volts would be much more vulnerable. It would take at least one year to fix and replace the burned systems.

People of the industrialized world heavily depend on power grids in their daily lives now, and almost everything around them would either not function or be disrupted without it. They are vulnerable to massive solar flares in a way ancient civilizations were never so.