Space weather in the New York Times and Washington Post
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0292
Recent high-visibility articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post have sought to raise awareness of space weather’s potential destructiveness on Earth and of mitigation measures that are being taken—or could be.
Madhulika Guhathakurta, a NASA solar physicist, and Daniel N. Baker, director of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, published a Times op-ed on 17 June. They sought ‘to highlight how far the scientific community and the government have to go to raise awareness about space weather and its effects’ and called for ‘a worldwide effort to forecast and understand space weather.’
Washington Post reporter Brian Vastag offered a 21 June feature on the front page of the ‘Health and Science’ section. The headline in the on-paper edition spoke with a slightly raised voice: ‘Sunburst could be a big blow—Experts say power grids and communications are vulnerable to ‘space weather.’' But Vastag’s piece presented possible planning and preparation measures along with reporting the destructive potential.
Both pieces draw their justification from, and do make quite clear, that destructive potential. The Times op-ed says:
Modern society depends on a variety of technologies that are susceptible to the extremes of space weather. Spectacular explosions on the Sun’s surface produce solar storms of intense magnetism and radiation. These events can disrupt the operation of power grids, railway signaling, magnetic surveying and drilling for oil and gas. Magnetic storms also heat the upper atmosphere, changing its density and composition and disrupting radio communications and GPS units. The storms’ charged particles can be a hazard to the health of astronauts and passengers on high altitude flights.
Severe storms in 1989 and 2003 caused blackouts in Canada and Sweden. In 1859, a solar super storm sparked fires in telegraph offices. Such storms are predicted every century or so, and perhaps we’re overdue. According to a 2008 National Academies report, a once-in-a-century solar storm could cause the financial damage of 20 Hurricane Katrinas.
The Post article warns:
Communications satellites will be knocked offline. Financial transactions, timed and transmitted via those satellites, will fail, causing millions or billions in losses. The GPS system will go wonky. Astronauts on the space station will huddle in a shielded module, as they have done three times in the past decade due to ‘space weather,’ the scientific term for all of the sun’s freaky activity. Flights between North America and Asia, over the North Pole, will have to be rerouted, as they were in April during a weak solar storm at a cost to the airlines of $100,000 a flight. And oil pipelines, particularly in Alaska and Canada, will suffer corrosion as they, like power lines, conduct electricity from the solar storm.
But the biggest impact will be on the modern marvel known as the power grid. And experts warn that the grid is not ready. In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences stated that an 1859-level storm could knock out power in parts of the northeastern and northwestern United States for months, even years. Report co-author John Kappenmann estimated that about 135 million Americans would be forced to revert to a pre-electric lifestyle or relocate. Water systems would fail. Food would spoil. Thousands could die. The financial cost: Up to $2 trillion, one-seventh the annual U.S. gross domestic product.
But both articles also report what can be done.
‘Luckily,’ says the Times op-ed, ‘policy makers are paying attention to space weather. Late last month, President Obama and the British prime minister David Cameron announced that the United States and Britain will work together to create ‘a fully operational global space weather warning system.’ And just last week, the United Nations pledged to upgrade its space weather forecasts.’ Later the Times piece adds:
The more we know about solar activity, the better we can protect ourselves. The Sun is surrounded by a fleet of space craft that can see sunspots forming, flares crackling and a solar storm about 30 minutes before it hits Earth. NASA and the National Science Foundation have also developed sophisticated models to predict where solar storms will go once they leave the Sun, akin to National Weather Service programs that track hurricanes and tornadoes on Earth. Thanks to these sentries, it is increasingly difficult for the Sun to take us by surprise.
If alerted, Internet server hubs, telecommunications centers and financial institutions can prepare for disruptions and power plant operators can disconnect transformers.
The Post article too reports on what it calls the ‘tricky business’ of NASA’s present detection, modeling and warning capabilities, including the satellite called the Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE. The article mentions calls for “Congress to fund other satellites to replace ACE before it runs out of fuel in 2021"—including DSCOVR, the one associated with former Vice President Al Gore, which ‘sits nearly finished in a hangar at Goddard, where it has languished since 2001.’ The Post also mentions the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC, which has ‘the power to make rules for electric utilities to prevent blackouts.’ And it describes legislation called the SHIELD Act, under consideration in the House, that would ‘force utility companies to protect 350 critical transformers from a massive solar storm.’ The bill reportedly ‘passed in the House unanimously’ last year, ‘only to stall in the Senate.’
Steve Corneliussen
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. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ 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.
