Solar storms reportedly present “the possibility of apocalypse”

News that the Sun could cause spectacular damage on Earth isn’t really new, but the Washington Post of Sunday, 14 July, reintroduced it most energetically.

A teaser atop the front page, pointing to the business section, warned: ‘The solar threat: Space weather could wreak havoc on the world economy.’ Dominating the business section front page with arrestingly bright colors, an illustration showed four people fleeing from a huge sun, with the superimposed headline ‘When space weather attacks!’

A large subheadline listed some of the threats: ‘Power outages. Disrupted communications. Diverted airplanes.’ In boldface, it continued: ‘How business is coping with big risks from outer space.’

A sidebar on that page said: ‘2.6 trillion—Estimated cost to repair damage from the failure of electrical systems after an especially severe solar storm. (To put that in context, Hurricane Sandy caused about $68 billion in damage.)’

After the jump to an inside page, a large, illustrated sidebar, ‘Why space weather matters ,’ depicted coronal mass ejections, solar flares, solar winds, and Earth’s magnetic field. It listed satellites, GPS devices, oil pipelines, aircraft communication, the space station, the power grid, and the water supply as vulnerable.

The text of the Post‘s article started with the 1859 Carrington event, a solar superstorm that caused disruption even in that technologically early time. If a solar disturbance of that magnitude occurred today, the article warned, it would be an ‘utter catastrophe.’ It ‘would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power—possibly for years—as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston.’

The Post added: ‘Chaos and riots might ensue.’

The article reported that businesses and government agencies have started to take space weather more seriously; that electric-grid operators, airlines, and the military are making contingency plans; and that coming reductions in US space-satellite coverage will exacerbate the problems.

The news and the risk analysis come with noteworthy provenance. In 2008, for example, the National Research Council released the report ‘Severe Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts .’ This year the insurer Lloyd’s of London released the report ‘Solar storm risk to the North American electric grid .’

Citing scientists, Lloyd’s declares that an ‘extreme geomagnetic storm is almost inevitable in the future,’ that the risk peaks with the current solar cycle in early 2015, and that ‘the risk of a catastrophic outage increases with each peak.’ The report emphasizes that even the ‘failure of a small number of transformers serving a highly populated area is enough to create a situation of prolonged outage.’

And the news and risk analysis have been cropping up from time to time. In a 2012 Post op-ed , for example, then-presidential-candidate Newt Gingrich warned that ‘national security and our power grid . . . are susceptible to doomsday-level damage if hit by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike or a major solar storm.’ Later that year, Reuters distributed the report ‘Solar superstorm could kill millions, cost trillions .’

Last month, Fox News reported on a measure under consideration in Congress, the SHIELD Act (the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act). USA Today published the opinion piece ‘Solar flare poses huge threat .’ It warned of a quick return to the 19th century.

The Post may have shown the way for still more coverage. The Seattle Times and others have run the Post‘s article.

Also in Seattle, in fact, one commentator, rather than working from journalism-derived material, looked for words to quote from a geophysicist. The result, a 16 July commentary at MyNorthwest.com, centers on comments video-recorded at a session of a 2011 American Geophysical Union meeting. The piece quotes Louis Lanzerotti of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who also chairs the American Institute of Physics governing board. He describes possible effects of a disturbance, cites recent occurrences, and calls for more research.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.