The Dangers of 2012 - For laughs....

[American Patriot]

http://2012codex.com/2012_danger_zones.html

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Danger Zones
2012 will bring about major environmental events and you will want to stay away from the areas we will refer to as the Danger Zones. DNA tells us that the entire current population of the earth can be traced back to only 2000 original survivors of the last great astronomical event which occured about 12,800 years ago. The Mayan civilization went to great lengths to warn us of upcoming events which created mass extinctions in the past. Clues are in evey tribe and civilization. Its just a matter of decoding. Everything 2012 will be explained throughout this site.










1)The first thing you should consider is flooding. An elevation above 70 meters
and preferably 120 meters above sea level would be preferable. 120 meters
above the current sea level would be the level attained should all the ice caps
melt. Refer to exhibit A below.









2) Earthquakes can be devistating. Techtonic plate shtifts can cause continents
to move. A tsunami off the coast of New Zealand in the 1400's was 600 feet. This activity was resposible for the great Chinese fleet to be distroyed and left many
Chinese stranded on different continents. The Chinese were in North America
long before Columbus Sailed from Spain. This was a great fleet with huge
ships that spanned the globe and was destroyed in the blink of an eye.
Imagine an earthquake 10x the Northridge quake. The earthquake in Haiti
is a small carribean plate. We will see more activity in the area. A subduction
quake can and will create a tsunami....possibly a super Tsunami. The Pacific
plate is rocking. California will see major activivty starting this year. get the 2012 newsletter for updates.
See Exhibit B below.









3) Volcanoes will erupt with changes in gravitational influences. Super volcanoes create major environmental havok. A super volcano can explode with a force one million times bigger than Hiroshima. Being near a volcano is not a wise idea. Ash can cover great amounts of land as happened with the supereruption of Lake Toba on Sumatra Island in Indonesia 72000 years ago, or Krakatoa in 535 BC. We now have two super volcanoes showing signs of getting ready to erupt. Each is bigger than Krakatoa. One is in Naples Italy and the other in Yellowstone USA. Yellowstonehas been experiencing a tremendous volume (Thousands). Many with 3.+ strength.
See Exhibit B and this link to Yellowstone Activity













4) Solar Flairs can disrupt communications, satellites, power grids, etc. On March 13th 1989, six million people lost power in the Quebec region of Canada after a huge increase in solar activity caused a surge from ground-induced currents. List of power outages NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft has discovered a hole in earth’s
magnetic field which is 10 times as large as previously thought. The magnetosphere, which is designed to protect earth from the plasma of solar flares, now has a hole in it four time the size of the earth. Think about backup. A lot of people will be thrown intot he dark ages, if they survive. Can you live without electricity? If so, how comfortable will you be? How much of a food supply
with no refridgeration? There are X-ray solar flare emissions, and Coronal Mass Ejections. Should the earth's magnetic field be reduced, you would want to take shelter underground thereby protecting yourself from radiation posioning. Don't be near a hole in the Ozone Layer during the peak of the solar flair activity that will occur during the solar maximum of Solar Cycle 24. The sun's alignment
with the galactic center on 21-12-2012 may trigger a massive flare. Probably a good idea to have shelter in a cave or underground facility. There are currently nearly 4000 class A & B bunkers (Class A being >1200m deep and Class B >400m <1200m deep) capable of holding 4 million refugees world wide. Cosmic radiation along with Gamma rays can be both deadly and also can change DNA both for the better (creating new proteens) or worse (radiation poisoning. A cave or underground can help to filter this. The caves in Sothern France showed
paintings of Cygnus. The Shaman knew to protect themselves and were able to use this energy as a means to greater enlightenment. They could see this cosmic energy in the darkness 1000 feet below the surface. See exhibit C below.
Exhibit A: Global Flooding
Sea Level Rise Interactive World Map
Exhibit B: Faultlines & Volcanoes
Surviving 2012 and beyond
survive 2012 with survival food, survival shelter, cave and undergroud shelters to save you. 2012 codex is about 2012 and the crossing of the dark rift, the precession of the equinox, which happens every 26000 years. Venus transit caused the 2004 earthquake and asia tsunami. The next crossing is June 2012. The return of nibiru, a pole shift and the change in the earths magnetic grid will allow solar flares to penetrate. Earthquakes, volcanoes and flooding with high winds will destroy many who are not prepared ( doomsday) Earth passes through the dark rift.Survive 2012 by being prepared and staying out of harms way. The 2012 survival guide along with ancient history to guide those seeking the light to survive and reach enlightenment. The Mayan calendar end date tells of the alignment of the cosmic cross on 21 12 2012. The prophesy calls for the end of this world.
Latest Earthquakes in the World - Last 7 days - Click here
Recent Earthquakes
http://www.iris.edu/seismon/
Borealis Auroras suddenly is seen in places far south of its normal area
nearer the arctic circle. Suddenly, lights everywhere begin to dim and
flicker, then become very bright for a moment in time. You wonder what is
happening when electrical power everywhere stops. Within minutes,
the entire area is without power.

Months later millions are dead or dying, infrastructures are in ruins, and
societies are truly thrown back into the stone age. With everyone back
in the dark ages, struggling to recover from the same fateful event -
a plasma discharge from our Sun. The sun can do just that.

Within the last century, modern man has been building systems which will
ultimately destroy civilization as we know it. The modern way of life relies on
technology and has exposed civilization to extraordinary danger . A plasma
discharge from the sun can destroy our power grid. The projections show
how catastrophic this event could be.

We as a civilization have been moving away from nature. We are not in
harmony with nature but have rather been trying to overpower it. In the
end times, nature will prove dominant. Having your own means of generating
electricity, protected by a Faraday cage will enable you to maintain until your
food supply runs out.

The surface of the sun is a boiling mass of plasma (charged high energy
particles) some of which is able to escape the surface and travel through
space. (known as solar wind) The solar wind can carry with it a billion
ton mass of plasma (coronal mass ejection). If this hits our magnetic
shield, the effect will be a disaster of epic proportion.

1st satellites will be knocked out. Then entering further into our atmosphere,
a coronal mass ejection will cause a very rapid change in our magnetic field.
D.C. currents will be induced into power lines. Our power grids were not built
to handle this direct current electricity. The greatest danger comes at
the transformers. These transformers are used to convert power from transport voltage to domestic voltage. The increased DC current will create strong magnetic fields that will saturate the transformers magnetic cores. The result is a runaway current in the transformer's wiring, causing rapid heat build up and destroying the transformer. A similar (much smaller event) happened in Quebec in March 1989, causing six million people to spend 9 hours without electricity. That was just a very small localized event giving us a taste of what could be a worldwide event lasting years rather than hours.

The biggest CME event in modern documented history happened
in 1859. Known as the Carrington event that lasted eight days. There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at the equator.
The world's telegraph networks experienced disruptions, and magnetometers
were pegged off the scale.

Today the challenge is greater. The first is the modern electrical grid, designed
to operate at very high voltages over large areas which provides an efficient
network, minimal power loss, and reduces overproduction. But alas, it has made
them much more vulnerable to solar events. The high-power grids would act as
antenna and carry enormous D.C. currents into transformers causing them to fail.

Modern interrelated systems that support a modern way of life will be
stopped. Without electricity there is no water or sewage treatment, no
grocery delivery, financial markets will close, factories, ATM's and all other
systems, all relying on electricity. This will be a time of chaos.

The less developed regions of the world will be better off than the high tech
regions. According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US
could induce ground currents that will knock out at least 300 key transformers
within seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people.

First concern is drinkable water. Anyone living in a building where water has
to be pumped would be cut off from any water immediately. For others, drinking
water will be available for only a few hours. With no electricity to pump water
from reservoirs, there will be no more after that. Where will you get your water?

All transportation is dependent on electricity. Trains, underground or overground can not run. Modern delivery networks are efficient, but it means that without electricity grocery shelves will be empty very quickly. All delivery trucks can only run until they are out of fuel. There will be no electricity to pump fuel from underground tanks at gas stations.

Back up generators can run until their fuel runs out. Hospitals have about 3 days
of running only essential services. After that, no more modern health care.

Its shocking that this situation would not improve for months in some locations
and years in others. Melted transformer hubs cannot be fixed, they have to be
replaced. There are only a few spare transformers. Installing a new one takes
a well trained crew at least a week. Major power companies have few trained
crews. When the few spare transformers are used up, the rest will have to be
built. This will take up to a year. Where will the factory get the power? Even when some systems are able to receive power again, there may not be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

Nuclear power stations are programmed to shut down in the event of grid
problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration, people will begin to die
within days. There is an immediate danger for those who rely on medication.
Perishable medications (insulin) will soon be in short supply. In the US alone
there are a million people with diabetes.

According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a "severe
geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the
first year. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. Can the US
bounce back from a $2 trillion dollar disaster? Who will finance that?

Sweden and Norway have known for some time that the regular views of the
aurora are pretty, but also warn of ever present threats to their
electrical grids. The trend now is toward installations of extremely
high voltage grids. China is installing a 1000 kilo-volt electrical grid, which is
twice the voltage of the US. This is a danger for the conduction of plasma
discharges because the grid's efficiency to act as an antenna increases as the
voltage between the grid and the ground increases.


Europe's electrical grids are highly interconnected and are extremely vulnerable
to cascading failures. In 2006, when they switched off of a small part of
Germany's grid to let a ship pass safely under high-voltage cables it caused a
cascading power failure across western Europe. In France, five million people
were left without electricity for two hours. "These systems are so complicated
we don't fully understand the effects." Hapgood says.

The best indicator is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE).
This probe was launched in 1997, and has a solar orbit that keeps it between
the sun and Earth. it gives us a continuous report of the direction and velocity of
solar winds and other streams of charged particles. ACE provides us with
advanced warning between 15 and 45 minutes of any incoming Geo-magnetic
storms. The power companies need about 15 minutes to prepare their systems
for a severe event. But during a Carrington event the coronal mass ejection
travels so fast it takes less than 15 minutes to get from where ACE is
positioned to Earth, arriving faster than we can do anything about it.
ACE is 11 years old is operating beyond its planned lifespan. The detectors are
not as sensitive as they used to be, and there is no telling when they will fail.

There is also no replacement for ACE. There are other solar observation satellites, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) which can provide some
warning, but sadly its too little too late. Losing ACE will largely lose our early
warning capability."

As with any natural disaster, most don't care until they are caught in the
aftermath. Typically no one cares until its too late and thoughts of
preparations are not considered. This could be one of the worst natural
disasters ever. It could affect greater populations than a localised event.
Around the time of the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth to the sun
makes us even more vulnerable to a plasma strike.

It is very difficult to inspire people to prepare for a potential crisis that has not
happened in there lifetime. Ask someone that was in the New Orleans Dome
if they would like to repeat that experience. The governments around the world
are not equiped to deal with a catastrophy of this scale.
When the Power Grid gets Destroyed
We are entering Solar Cycle 24. CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit the Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME will tear a hole in the magnetosphere and load it with plasma. This is the perfect scenerio for a huge event.

Home
Exhibit C
When the Power Grid gets Destroyed see below exhibit C
World map of volcanoes and supervolcanoes
SUPER-ERUPTIVE VOLCANOES WATCH

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[Toad]

Oh, Lord. The kooks are out there, but next year should give us a bumper crop. I can't wait until about this time December next year. The Prophets of Disaster will be on every street corner.

[American Patriot]

I posted this site link and the front page for a reason.... the first part, paragraph states:

2012 will bring about major environmental events and you will want to stay away from the areas we will refer to as the Danger Zones. DNA tells us that the entire current population of the earth can be traced back to only 2000 original survivors of the last great astronomical event which occured about 12,800 years ago. The Mayan civilization went to great lengths to warn us of upcoming events which created mass extinctions in the past. Clues are in evey tribe and civilization. Its just a matter of decoding. Everything 2012 will be explained throughout this site.

This is really a load of nonsense.

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that 2012 (or any other particular year) will "bring about major environmental events". So, the argument starts out postulating something that has no basis in fact.

The very next statement says:

DNA tells us that the entire current population of the earth can be traced back to only 2000 original survivors of the last great astronomical event which occured about 12,800 years ago.

This piece of data is only PARTIALLY true. In fact, there was indeed something called a "DNA bottleneck" and DNA evidence does show this to be true. Here's the facts behind this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

Humans

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has postulated that human mitochondrial DNA (inherited only from one's mother) and Y chromosomecoalescence at around 140,000 and 60,000 years ago respectively. In other words, all living humans' female line ancestry trace back to a single female (Mitochondrial Eve) at around 140,000 years ago. Via the male line, all humans can trace their ancestry back to a single male (Y-chromosomal Adam) at around 60,000 to 90,000 years ago.^[2] DNA (from one's father) show


This is consistent with the Toba catastrophe theory which suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 15,000 individuals^[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change, and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)^[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans.^[3]


However, such coalescence is genetically expected and does not, in itself, indicate a population bottleneck, because mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA are only a small part of the entire genome, and are atypical in that they are inherited exclusively through the mother or through the father, respectively. Most genes in the genome are inherited from either father or mother, thus can be traced back in time via either matrilineal or patrilineal ancestry.^[5] Research on many genes finds different coalescence points from 2 million years ago to 60,000 years ago when different genes are considered, thus disproving the existence of more recent extreme bottlenecks (i.e. a single breeding pair).^[3][6]


On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.^[7] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.^[8]

The site has the number of individuals, and the approximate year wrong. Not only that, there is a statement that perhaps population dropped as low as 2000 in Africa for a time. That isn't the whole of the human population that existed everywhere either.

This is a PRIME example of misuse of data, and basic, out and out lying about facts. Or - worse, making things up.

No where in the history of the human race is recorded events that wiped entire populations of the planet - unless you count Genesis 6:1 - 9:17 in the Bible and Noah's Flood. God's purpose was not though to destroy people, but sin and wickedness. Apparently even God didn't succeed in this attempt because merely looking at the site posted above is an example of sin (lying) and wickedness (misinformation used to mislead gullible people).

I suppose it's par for the course in the human race though.

Next in the very first paragraph the author uses mysticism and obfuscation to mislead.

The Mayan civilization went to great lengths to warn us of upcoming events which created mass extinctions in the past. Clues are in evey tribe and civilization.

They did? Where? What tribes, and civilizations did this? What clues and what codes were used? Why not simply state OUTRIGHT what it is you're warning about?

In today's society we try to make things plainly clear - though we do enjoy freedom of speech in America and many other countries today, and are less forced to follow some Biblical stricture against speaking a certain way.

On the other hand, when this author warns of "Electromagnetic Pulse" (EMP) dangers I do so in the interest of society as a whole - my own country and that of everyone else. I do not differentiate on who should be protected, and I attempt to be as scientifically accurate as my own training and knowledge allow, as well as my own research.

In 100 years from now, if my words are still on the internet someplace, people will not have to read between the lines, or "decode Rick's message" since there is no code, there is no cipher, I'm clear as I can be on the dangers of EMP.

There is no such explanation in the Mayan "prophecies". In fact, honestly, has anyone ever really read a "prophecy" by the Mayans? I have never read one word of so-called "Mayan prophecy" that might point to the end of the world as we know it (teotwawki).

In fact, most of the stuff written by them came into being probably 2500-2800 years after they even created a long count calendar. And whatever they were talking about was pretty nonsensical anyway.

The Mayans had no inkling of what was to come in their distant future, let alone OUR distant future. You see, the Mayan civilization collapsed more than 1000 years ago around 1000 AD. Cities were being abandoned quickly, and no one really knows why. But it could have something to do with in fighting, various groups and tribes trying to hold power.

Another five hundred years later would come the Spaniards, about 1517 who brought with them Old World diseases like small pox, the common cold, influenza and measles which killed thousands. In less than a century more than 90% of the population of Mezoamerica had died off.

In 1524 Cortez shows up. For the next 20 plus years, the remaining Mayans fight until they are eventually defeated and the Spanish establish a capitol city in Yucatan at Mérida.

The Mayan's never seemed to pass on any information to the Spanish about their eventual demise in 2012. Not one word is written by the Spanish conquistadors of the Mayan prophecies.

Everything 2012 will be explained throughout this site.

One could only hope and wish for everything about 2012 to be explained only given the very first paragraph of the site, I have my doubts.

I for one will wait for 22 December 2012 and say "I told you so...."

[American Patriot]

1)the first thing you should consider is flooding. An elevation above 70 meters and preferably 120 meters above sea level would be preferable. 120 meters above the current sea level would be the level attained should all the ice caps melt. Refer to exhibit a below.

I suspect that those living on boats should be JUST FINE.....

Currently there are about 30,000,000 cubic kilometers of ice in the world's icecaps and glaciers. Floating ice will NOT change the level of the ocean AT ALL. Please be aware of this and prove it yourself.

Take a glass of water, nearly full. Add a few ice cubes and then a little more water to bring the water right to the rim of the glass. Leave it set at room temperature for awhile until the ice melts. You will note that NONE of the water will have overflowed the glass.

You might have some condensation, but the glass will remain at the same level as when the ice was solid.

Prove it yourself.

Basically, it will take several thousands of years to melt ALL the ice on the planet. The temperature would have to go up DRASTICALLY, not just a degree or two, but drastically, like 12-25 degrees overall, and the north and south poles would have to become temperate zones. All but impossible given the Earth's orbit and tilt!

Even IF it all melted, the amount of land mass most likely that is lost would be compensated for by the land mass of Antarctica becoming a warm, dry, above-sea level land mass. We'd lose Florida and some islands around the world, and some places in Europe would be under water, but only shoreline would be lost...

Global Warming people are lousy liars and worse than any sort of alarmists.

[American Patriot]

Of course, there IS SOME scientific evidence to point to 2012 being a banner year for disaster.

Back in 2009 for instance.....

Perfect Space Storm Could be Catastrophic on Earth, Study Concludes By Robert Roy Britt Editorial Director posted: 07 January 2009 09:03 am ET

The sun works on a pretty well known 11-year cycle of activity, all measured by sunspots and solar flares.


But like the stock market, the sunspot cycle is unpredictable. And just when astronomers thought it had hit bottom, it went lower. It has been a bear market for sunspots for many months now. That also means there have been no major space storms, which can zap satellites and threaten power grids on Earth.


There were no sunspots observed on 266 days during 2008, or 73 percent of the time. The last year things were quieter was 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Some observers figured the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.



But the sunspot recession is not over. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower, the space agency announced today. As of March 31, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent).


"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," said sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.


Why it matters
It matters because scientists would like to be able to predict when things will pick up, and when the next "solar maximum" will occur. At peak activity, tentatively expected in three or four years, more and more powerful solar storms up the odds of a satellite failure or a power grid malfunction.


Solar storms pack charged particles that slam into our atmosphere and, when they penetrate, can cause a cascade of failures in satellites and power systems.


A recent report by National Academy of Sciences concluded that a major storm during the next peak could cripple power grids and other communications systems and could be catastrophic, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.


Other records set in 2008:


A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20 percent drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s -- the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.


A 55-year low in solar radio emissions that might -- or might not -- indicate weakness in the sun's global magnetic field.
A 12-year low in solar irradiance: Several NASA spacecraft find the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% percent at visible wavelengths and a whopping 6 percent at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996.



These changes are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, the agency stated, but there are some other, noticeable side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, dangerous space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.


"We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," said solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.


What's up?
All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.


"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."


Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.
Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

• Video - How Space Storms Wreak Havoc on Earth
• World to End in 2012 (Check Back for Updates)
• Gallery: Solar Storms

[American Patriot]

Issue #70: The Great Solar Superstorm of 1859

Figure 1: A coronal mass ejection seen by the SOHO satellite.

150 years ago, the sun let loose a powerful superstorm - can it happen again?

"She ran screaming down the street, unable to contain her terror as night was turned into hideous crimson daylight…communications networks failed and equipment burst into flame…a bustling city lost power, trapping thousands of people inside elevators…satellites malfunctioned and in an instant millions of people lost touch with critical services, doctors and children."


These are not the theatrical elements of some B-grade science fiction movie, but just a few events that played out during severe solar storms of the past. As the current sunspot cycle draws to a close, the tally of solar storms vouches for the sun's stormy nature. Over 21,000 flares and 13,000 coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have exploded from the sun's magnetically active surface since 1996. Solar storms cause spectacular aurora borealis to take the skies, dazzling and humbling all who were fortunate to be in the right geographic locals. But today, these storms pass by with far more impact, not only as fodder for folklore, but as costly lessons that our technology is still not immune from an ages-old phenomenon. Fortunately, apart from the X-34 superflare on November 4, 2003 and the powerful geomagnetic storms on July 15, 2001 and October 29, 2003, this solar activity cycle was actually rather well-behaved. Once every few centuries, however, the sun erupts with a major event unlike anything we have experienced in recent memory.


Between August 28 - September 6, 1859, humans experienced one of the most spectacular solar storms in the last 450 years. Reconstruction of this event from historical data has led space weather researchers in recent years to classify it as a Superstorm. Here's what it was like:
Figure 2: Richard Carrington drew this sketch of the white-light flare, shown as the two white semi-circles in the complex sunspot group.

The Superstorm of 1859

The first CME arrived arrived on August 28th and was even by modern accounts a major storm in its own right. Visible in the Northern Hemisphere as far south as Cuba. But the real excitement came with the second CME launched a few days later on September 1. Astronomer Robert Carrington and amateur astronomer Rodger Hodgson had been observing the sun from their observatories near London, England, when both were fortunate to spot a rare, and powerful white-light flare just before Noon. This flare also launched the second CME in the direction of Earth.



The second CME had all the right things going for it. It was fast; it had the right magnetic field orientation, and like a snow plow it was a dense wall of plasma second to none. In just over 17 hours, it swept across the entire inner solar system. At 05:00 UT, an insignificant part of its magnetized plasma brushed by Earth's magnetic field.



Within minutes, the entire sun-facing magnetic hemisphere was disrupted and compressed until it reached Earth's tenuous outer atmosphere. The ozone layer was instantly reduced by 5%, and would take several years to recover. The rest of Earth's magnetic field in the night-side became a complex, tangled mass of field lines trying to sort themselves out across a trillion cubic kilometers of space.


The magnetic upheaval in space, utterly invisible to the human eye, continued for a day or more, while from the ground spectacular aurora were seen as far as the equatorial climates of Central America and Bombay, India. In its wake, the Van Allen belts vanished as did Earth's entire plasmasphere, raining energetic particles into the upper atmosphere causing crimson-red aurora worldwide.


Predictably, people saw cities on fire, or specters dancing in glee over some celestial battle. They stood and gawked by the millions, or wrote detailed eyewitness descriptions to their newspapers. In this pre-Civil War era, the only technological impact was telegraph outages and instrument fires, but the scope was world-wide and reached from Scandinavia to Australia.


Today, such an event would be without any historical precedent. At no other time has the web of technology so completely engulfed our day-to-day lives, from the scale of our national electrification grid, to satellites orbiting in space, and human activity in the air and in space. Literally billions of people are now in close personal contact with the most space weather-prone technologies. Luckily, Superstorms seem to be rare events for a star like our sun.
A Tale of Ice and Fire

Deep within ice crystals in Greenland and Antarctica, nitrate atoms had collected in trapped gases since the year 1561. Scientists Michael Smart, Donald Shea and Kennith McCracken at the Air Force Research Lab and the University of Maryland discovered that nitrate concentrations rose and fell suddenly with solar activity. They were a particularly good barometer of powerful radiation storms called 'Solar Proton Events'.



In the 450 years covered by the record, the biggest of these SPEs was the 1859 Superstorm event. Slightly weaker storms, however, are far more numerous.


In recent times, the SPEs that occurred on August 4, 1972 and March 1991, have been used by the satellite industry as the worst case SPE events. Since 1561, there have been 19 events more intense than these, with an average arrival interval of 23 years. The overall pace of their arrival is not uniform in time. These two events are the only major ones recorded since 1965. By comparison, during the same 40-year periods between 1850-1890 and between 1890-1930 there were 10 events more intense than the one on August 1972. The current 40-year period has been the least productive in generating large SPEs since as far back as 1670 during the Maunder Minimum! If you wanted to build satellites that endure the rigors of the space environment, Cycle 23 and some of the severe storms during the last 50 years, were probably the wrong examples to use as a 'tall pole' for how bad things can get.


So, what would a modern-day Superstorm be like? There isn't a single prediction that shows one of these storms is in our immediate future, but what would happen if Cycle 24 were to pull a surprise?


Figure 3: Ice core data shows a strong spike (red bar) in the atmospheric nitrate (NOx) abundances during the 1859 storm, along with lesser spikes for many other storms since 1500.

A Modern Superstorm

The year would be close to sunspot maximum, sometime between 2010 and 2012. The most favorable months would be March or September during the Equinoxes. A large, angry-looking sunspot would be transiting the solar meridian with many astronomers worried in the days leading up to the event. Perhaps a few baby X-10 flares and a dozen more X-1 flares would signal the hopelessly tangled magnetic conditions running amuck. Each flare would cause notable short-wave blackouts.


Unless this storm were also launched by a white-light flare visible to lucky amateur and professional solar observers, the armada of solar research satellites such as Hinode, STEREO, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory would be among the first to see it. An intense blast of X-rays and energetic particles would black-out every sensor system in space on the daylight side of Earth. The massive pulse of x-rays would destroy the D-layer and cause instant shortwave blackouts across the sun-side hemisphere. The ozone layer would be depleted by 5 or 10%, causing a spike in skin cancer events for the statistically unlucky.


If it were a double-barreled CME, the first one would have dazzled us with spectacular aurora in the Northern Hemisphere rivaling the Halloween 2003 storms. The second one, launched perhaps a day later, would have a frictionless interplanetary medium to navigate and arrive at Earth within 15-20 hours. A tremendous pulse of energetic protons accelerated by shockwaves in the CME would race ahead of the plasma wall, and instantly invade satellite circuitry. Thousands of satellite operations anomalies would be recorded, of which a fair fraction would be fatal. The protons would enter the atmosphere and cause nuclear interactions, liberating high-speed neutrons in showers that would reach the ground. Computer systems would crash as 'Sudden Event Upsets' violate the integrity of binary information stored in memory. The loss of some satellites, and malfunctions to others, could at a minimum escalate within hours to become a $20 billion loss in revenue and resources. Defense Department satellites would also be blinded to varying degrees, and the GPS system would report highly inaccurate positions for a day or more. Precision navigation, oil drilling, search and rescue, and military bombing would come to a halt, with potentially disasterous consequences.


Despite these events, we could luck-out. Half the time, the magnetic orientation of CMEs is 'north directed' so that the interaction with Earth's magnetic field is weak. The storm would pass with only moderate impact. But without some cosmic bon homie, we are in for another exciting ride.


According to John Kappenman, an electric power engineer at MetaTech Corporation, a modern-day solar storm as severe as the one experienced in 1921 would affect 150 million people across North America in a blackout without any precident. Insidious magnetic storm currents would damage transformers for which no replacements are available, and have to be manufactured overseas since no domestic suppliers exist. According to some estimates, during a superstorm event, the daily cost could exceed about $30 billion in lost salaries, spoiled food, foundry closures and other collateral effects - and this state could persist for a week or more


Figure 4: The American painter Frank Church rendered this famous painting 'The Northern Lights' in the early 1860s, perhaps inspited by the 1859 event. (Courtesy: The National Gallery of Art; Smithsonian Institution)

"The End of the World...News at 11:00"

A common feature shared by the earlier storm events since 1850 is the lavish newspaper accounts describing them. On March 25, 1940, the Boston Globe ran a banner headline 'U.S. Hit by Magnetic Storm' in 2-inch lettering above the fold. They banked heavily on the average reader knowing what a 'magnetic storm' was. During those years, most people did! Since the 1950's, solar storms have all but vanished from the front page, and the stories have moved deeper into the daily papers. They have also been shorn of any details of specific incidents, so their human impact has been muted. For instance, the historic March 13, 1989 storm blacked-out Quebec for 12 hours, cost several billion dollars and a lot of political embarrassment in Canada. It was a Cosmic Event that was not even mentioned in the major US papers of the day.
Ironically, although we are far more vulnerable to major solar storms since the 1960's, they now tend to be regarded by the Public for their entertainment value and night-time spectacle, rather than their historically-recognized capacity to do serious harm. Did you know that the solar storm of September 24, 1946 caused navigation errors that led to a famous plain crash in Gander, Newfoundland, which killed 26 passengers and crew?


The previous sunspot cycle was actually quite eventful. It was a costly cycle of satellite outages and losses totaling by some estimates nearly $3 billion. Satellite industry trade journals spoke about insurance brokers struggling under massive billion-dollar annual payouts. Collectively, our commercial satellites lost about 3 years of lifespan at an eventual cost of tens of billions in lost profit. There were also several near-misses with US electrical power grids pushed to near-blackout conditions but rescued in the nick of time. Along the way, we also heard about miraculous NASA satellites such as SOHO, ACE, IMAGE and Polar that could collectively watch solar storms from cradle to grave. 'Space Weather' had arrived as a news-worthy subject, though in the end it was a dramatic human-interest topic that didn’t sell many books.
Our next national blackout could come as a complete surprise even though the necessary technology to alert us to impending problems was well-known and heavily used during the previous cycle. If the cosmic dice fall the wrong way, we may well look back at Cycle 23 as 'the good old days'.


Figure 5: A night time view of the United States showing city lights from coast to coast.

"And the good news is...."

According to research by Brad Schaefer at Yale University, it is not uncommon for mild-mannered stars like our sun to explode in a 'superflare' from time to time. By comparison, these superflares are millions of times more intense than the 1859 event. In 2000, he and his colleagues identified nine solar-type stars such as Kappa Ceti, with flares up to 100 million times more powerful than any seen on the sun to date. Their studies suggest superflares can occur every 100 years or so in otherwise ordinary, stable, Main Sequence stars.



If the sun were to have such an eruption, it could possibly cause mass extinctions, plunge the Earth into brief heat wave, flood the planet with gamma and X-rays, melt electronics in orbiting satellites, cause global auroras and wipe out all of the ozone that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. "The loss of ozone could kill the food chain and probably cause mass extinctions," Schaefer said.


But don’t' worry. The 1859 Superstorm seems to be the best our sun can muster. Evidence from cosmic ray tracks in moon rocks suggests that the sun has not produced too many of these superflares during the last 5 million years. Still more ancient solar superflares would have melted the ice on the moons of Jupiter and left smooth frozen plains, and we don't see any traces of them, either!


The reason that the sun has these disturbances in the first place has less to do with the immense gravity of this nearby star, which keeps our earth in orbit, but much more to do with another force of nature that you have daily experience with in many different guises....Magnetism!
The Sun-Earth Connection

The realization that the the sun is a star whose magnetic phenomena can cause problems for humans and human technology even from a distance of 150 million kilometers!
Space Math Connection:

These problems are available at Space Math @ NASA (http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Monster Sunspots! [Problem 107]

Students will determine the scale of three images of large sunspots including the Carrington Spot, and order the spots in increasing size [Grade 5-8; = Skills:=20 image scales; metric measurement]
Solar Storms: Sequences and probability [Problem 175]

Students work out all the ways that three flares and two CMEs can occur on a Friday of a week [Grade 5-8; Skills: Probability, counting, creating sequences]
Solar Storm Timeline [Problem 198]

Students read an essay and determine the sequence of events during a solar storm[Grade 4-6; Skills: critical reading; time arithmetic]
Magnetic Math [Book]

This book features 40 mathematics problems related to the study of magnetism. [Grade 4-12; Skills: hands-on labs; pre-Algebra, Geometry, Algebra I, Algebra II]
References:

Odenwald, S. F. and Green, J., 2008, "Bracing for a Solar Superstorm", Scientific American, August 2008, pp. 80-85
Odenwald, S. F., 2008, "The Coming Solar Superstorm", Astronomy, September, 2008, pp 34-39

• SED-2005 Solar Observatories TTT 1-30
• SED-2006 - First observations of the sun by humans - TTT 31-47

SED-2007 - Solar Science:

• TTT 48 - The Sun from Cradle to Grave
• TTT 49 - Solar Energy
• TTT 50 - Ancient Sunlight
• TTT 52/6 - Solar activity and features
• TTT 57 - The Heliosphere

SED-2008 - Space Weather Around the World:

• TTT 58 - Why is the sun's corona hot?
• TTT 59 - Where did all the neutrinos go?
• TTT 60 - Where does the sun's magnetic field come from?

Credits:

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Author - Hinode)

[American Patriot]

Then again, even the Catholic Church thinks something's up....

News

Vatican astronomer downplays 2013 solar storm fears
September 27, 2010

Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory is downplaying apocalyptic scenarios associated with the 2013 solar storm, which may disrupt cell phone and wireless communication.



Recalling that a similar storm in the 1960s shut down the power grid in Quebec for a day, the Detroit-born Jesuit brother said that while “everything is possible, whether it’s likely is another issue.” Nonetheless, Consolmagno cautioned that it is important to have “more than one way of communicating so we don't have all our eggs in one basket.”



Consolmagno’s seven-minute interview with Vatican Radio is particularly helpful because he explains solar storms and other solar phenomena in layman’s terms.
Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Solar storm warning (Vatican Radio)
• 2013 Solar Storm Could Create Widespread Panic (RedOrbit)
• Guy Consolmagno (Wikipedia)

[American Patriot]

/grin