The second post in my series on geomagnetic storms is up on GiveWell.org. It is arguably the most important and interesting in the series. It explains why I think past storms, reaching back to 1859, were probably at most twice as strong as anything our electricity-dependent societies have experienced in recent decades—and shrugged off.
Do you remember the great storms of 1982 and 2003? I didn’t notice them either. And probably you survived the Québec blackout of 1989, which was mostly over within 11 hours. Yet maybe that last doubling in storm intensity would inflict far, far more than twice as much destruction on the grid. Or maybe the grid has become much more vulnerable since 1989, even though grid operators have learned from that experience. It’s also possible I’m wrong that doubling is the worst we should fear. For all these reasons, I still think the threat deserves more attention from researchers, industry, and governments.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the strongest proponent for the view that the worst case is much worse, is John Kappenman, who has argued for a multiplier of 10 rather than 2. In the new post and the report, I trace this number in part to an obscure book of scientific scholarship written in 1925 by a Swedish telegraph engineer in French. The search involved talking to an electrical engineer in Finland, people at the Encyclopedia Britannica in Chicago (who were very helpful), and ordering said obscure book from a German book shop. Author David Stenquist describes how the storm of 1921 caused copper wires running into a telegraph office to melt—but not iron ones. He deduces that the storm-induced voltage on the line could not have been as high as 20 volts/kilometer. Yet through a scholarly game of telephone over the decades, this observation got turned on its head.
Below is a key section I scanned from the book’s yellowed pages. For more, read the post or the report.
Continue reading “Geomagnetic storms: The “Big One” might only be twice as big as what’s already hit”