Solar Storms could create Chaos in 2010

STORMS HURRICANES-TORNADOES

LUKE 21:25-26
25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity;(MASS CONFUSION) the sea and the waves roaring;(FIERCE WINDS)
26 Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

FEARFUL SIGHTS AND GREAT SIGNS FROM HEAVEN

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months Friday, January 09, 2009 | FoxNews.com By Robert Roy Britt
Solar storms can cause colorful auroras, often seen in higher latitudes on Earth.A new study from the National Academy of Sciences outlines grim possibilities on Earth for a worst-case scenario solar storm.Damage to power grids and other communications systems could be catastrophic, the scientists conclude, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.The prediction is based in part on a major solar storm in 1859 that caused telegraph wires to short out in the United States and Europe,igniting widespread fires.

POWER OUTAGE

REVELATION 16:10-11
10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain,
11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.

FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS

REVELATION 8:7
7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
It was perhaps the worst in the past 200 years, according to the new study, and with the advent of modern power grids and satellites, much more is at risk.A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions, the researchers conclude.

Command and control might be lost

When the sun is in the active phase of its 11-year cycle, it can unleash powerful magnetic storms that disable satellites, threaten astronaut safety, and even disrupt communication systems on Earth.

OZONE DEPLETION

ISAIAH 30:26-27
26 Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound.
27 Behold, the name of the LORD cometh from far, burning with his anger, and the burden thereof is heavy: his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue as a devouring fire:

MATTHEW 24:21-22,29
21 For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
22 And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened (Daylight hours shortened)
29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:

REVELATION 16:7-9
7 And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.
8 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.
9 And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.

The worst storms can knock out power grids by inducing currents that melt transformers.Modern power grids are so interconnected that a big space storm — the type expected to occur about once a century — could cause a cascade of failures that would sweep across the United States, cutting power to 130 million people or more in this country alone, the new report concludes.Such widespread power outages, though expected to be a rare possibility, would affect other vital systems.

POWER OUTAGE

REVELATION 16:10-11
10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain,
11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.

Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures with, for example, potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply and so on,the report states.

FAMINE

REVELATION 6:5-6
5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.(A DAYS WAGES FOR A LOAF OF BREAD)

FAMINE

MATTHEW 24:7-8
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

MARK 13:8
8 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

Outages could take months to fix, the researchers say. Banks might close, and trade with other countries might halt.Emergency services would be strained, and command and control might be lost, write the researchers, led by Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents, the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems, Baker said in a statement released with the report.
FEARFUL SIGHTS AND GREAT SIGNS FROM HEAVEN

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

KNOWLEGE AND WORLD TRAVEL INCREASED

DANIEL 12:4
4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro,(WORLD TRAVEL,IMMIGRATION) and knowledge shall be increased.(COMPUTERS MICROCHIPS ETC)

Stormy past

Solar storms have had significant effects in modern time:
— In 1989, the sun unleashed a tempest that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada.
— A remarkable 2003 rampage included 10 major solar flares over a two-week period, knocking out two Earth-orbiting satellites and crippling an instrument aboard a Mars orbiter.

Obviously, the sun is Earth's life blood,said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics division at NASA. To mitigate possible public safety issues, it is vital that we better understand extreme space weather events caused by the sun's activity.Space weather can produce solar storm electromagnetic fields that induce extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines, causing wide-spread blackouts and affecting communication cables that support the Internet,the report states. Severe space weather also produces solar energetic particles and the dislocation of the Earth's radiation belts, which can damage satellites used for commercial communications, global positioning and weather forecasting.

Rush to prepare

The race is on for better forecasting abilities, as the next peak in solar activity is expected to come around 2012.While the sun is in a lull now, activity can flare up at any moment, and severe space weather — how severe, nobody knows — will ramp up a year or two before the peak.Some scientists expect the next peak to bring more severe events than other recent peaks.A catastrophic failure of commercial and government infrastructure in space and on the ground can be mitigated through raising public awareness, improving vulnerable infrastructure and developing advanced forecasting capabilities, the report states. Without preventive actions or plans, the trend of increased dependency on modern space-weather sensitive assets could make society more vulnerable in the future.The report was commissioned and funded by NASA. Experts from around the world in industry, government and academia participated. It was released this week.2009 Imaginova Corp.

The Great Storm: Solar Tempest of 1859 Revealed
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer 06:00 am ET 27 October 2003

A pair of strong solar storms that hit Earth late last week were squalls compared to the torrent of electrons that rained down in the perfect space storm of 1859. And sooner or later, experts warn, the Sun will again conspire again send earthlings a truly destructive bout of space weather. If it happens anytime soon, we won't know exactly what to expect until it's over, and by then some modern communication systems could be like beachfront houses after a hurricane.In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii. The event 144 years ago was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory, one that cut power to an entire Canadian province in 1989. A new account of the 1859 event, from research led by Bruce Tsurutani of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, details the most powerful onslaught of solar energy in recorded history.

Solar conspiracy

Space storms are created when the Sun erupts, sending charged particles racing outward, an expanding bubble of hot gas called plasma.In 1859, four crucial events conspired at one moment, Tsurutani told SPACE.com.The plasma blob that was ejected from the Sun hit the Earth, he said. That's a relatively routine event. What preceded the strike was more unusual. The blob came at exceptionally high speeds. It took only 17 hours and 40 minutes to go from the Sun to Earth. Solar storms typically take two to four days to traverse the 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).The magnetic fields in the blob, called a coronal mass ejection, were exceptionally intense, Tsurutani said. And the fourth, most important, ingredient was that the magnetic fields of the blob were opposite in direction from the Earth's fields.Earth's magnetic field normally protects the surface of the planet from a continual flow of charged particles, called the solar wind, and even does a pretty good job defending against some storms. When a storm swept past Earth last Friday, it met up with magnetic field pointed in such a way that it thwarted the storm's effects. That's not always the case.

In 1859, the planet's defenses were overwhelmed.

That was then

Society back then did not notice the storm the way it would today. The telegraph was 15 years old. There were no satellite TV feeds, no automated teller machines relying on orbiting relay stations, and no power grids. Tsurutani said scientists can't yet accurately measure or predict what the strength or direction of Earth's magnetic field will be when a storm arrives. The storms themselves can be predicted. And Tsurutani says there will eventually be another one like 1859.It could very well be even more intense than what transpired in 1859, he says. As for when, we simply do not know.Bernhard Fleck, the European Space Agency's project scientist for the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft, says the next super space storm will be detectable, but that's only half the story.A monster event of the magnitude described [by Tsurutani] we would easily recognize as something extraordinary with SOHO and other solar instruments, Fleck said in an e-mail interview. But, he added, We certainly wouldn't know its full extent until arrival.During the 1859 flare-up, solar observers logged almost an entire minute during which the amount of sunlight doubled at the region of the flare.Such a strong white-light flare has never been seen since, says Paal Brekke, SOHO deputy project scientist. So if this type of flare happened, yes we would know right away. But he adds that the orientation of Earth's magnetic field would not be known. Future space-based observatories could address this blind spot in space weather forecasting.

Meanwhile, the blind spot became clear on Friday.

Forecasters at NOAA's Space Environment Center, relying on SOHO pictures and data, warned of an impending set of storms that could disrupt communications and might set off colorful aurora Friday and Saturday. The forecast, along with two Jupiter-sized sunspots at the roots of the storms, gained widespread media attention. But the first and larger of the storms passed by with far less effect than one might have been led to expect. In fact, they were both comparative drops in the space weather bucket.

Extreme measures

To get an idea of the strength of the 1859 storm, you have to wade into nT's for a moment.A space storm's impact is measured in nano-Teslas (nT), Brekke explained. The lower the figure, the more powerful the storm. A moderate storm can be around -100 nT; extreme and damaging storms have been logged at around -300 nT. The 1989 coronal mass ejection that knocked out power to all of Quebec, Canada measured -589 nT, Brekke said. The 1859 perfect storm was estimated to have been -1,760 nT. Brekke used three exclamation points in his e-mail delivering that number.People on the ground are generally safe even in the worst space weather. But technology could be in trouble when the next super storm hits.In 1859, the technology was quite low in comparison to today's technology, Tsurutani said. However the technology that we rely on today is much more vulnerable.A strong storm does its damage in part by inducing currents on power and communication lines, leading to potential overloads. Obviously, there are a lot more wires on Earth today, so one might expect much worse problems if it occurred today.The charged particles can also zap satellites, as has occurred with handful of storms in recent years -- events with far fewer charged particles than in 1859. A space storm also heats the upper level of Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand. That's no good for satellites that can get caught up in air that didn't used to be there.This can lead to enhanced satellite drag and possible loss of these to the atmosphere, Tsurutani said. Tsurutani and his colleagues -- Walter Gonzalez of the Brazilian National Space Institute and Gurbax Lakhina and Sobhana Alex of the India Institute of Geomagnetism -- reviewed known observations of the 1859 event's solar and aurora output, plus accounts from the ground. They also used recently rediscovered historic data on Earth's magnetic field from the Colaba Observatory in India.The findings were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.This article is part of SPACE.com's weekly Mystery Monday series.

New Flares of Activity Spotted on the Sun
By SPACE.com Staff 07 November 2008 03:22 pm ET

After more than two years of very low sunspot activity and hardly any flares, the sun is ramping up activity now.The sun's activity ebbs and flows on a roughly 11-year cycle. It can range from very quiet to violent space storms that knock out power grids on Earth and disrupt radio and satellite communications. The last peak was in 2000, and scientists have in recent months figured the low point was occurring. Fresh sunspots during October suggest the corner has been turned.I think solar minimum is behind us, said David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Last month we counted five sunspot groups.he says.

Sunspots are cool areas on the solar surface where magnetic energy is bottled up. While five groups is not extraordinary, it is significant in comparison to the months of virtually no spots.This represents a real increase in solar activity, Hathaway said in a statement today.The next cycle of activity, which we are presumably now in, is called Solar Cycle 24. The transition, however, is gradual. Hints of it started last year. But the sun holds many secrets that prevent scientists from knowing exactly when, why or how the transition occurs. Spots from the old and new cycles differ in their latitude and magnetic polarity.From January to September, the sun produced 22 sunspot groups, and 82 percent of them belonged to old Cycle 23. Four of the five cycles in October belonged to Cycle 24.On Nov. 3 and again on Nov. 4, a sunspot numbered 1007 unleashed a series of B-class solar flares. These relatively minor events were strong enough to cause fades and surges in ham radio transmissions on Earth. Bigger flares, which could happen any time but will be more likely when the next peak comes in a few years, can disable satellites.We're still years away from solar maximum and, in the meantime, the sun is going to have some more quiet stretches,Hathaway said.

The Enduring Mysteries of the Sun By Charles Q. Choi
Special to SPACE.com 22 October 2007 06:34 am ET

The sun lies at the heart of our solar system, but it still holds back many secrets from science. Unlocking these mysteries could shed light on puzzling activity seen in other stars and even safeguard lives.

An explosive star

The sun is literally bursting with energy, violently exploding with solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other kinds of eruptions up to hundreds of times per year. The number of explosions and sunspots the sun experiences tends to rise and fall in a roughly 11-year-long solar cycle, the roots of which remain uncertain.

Astrophysicists generally agree the solar cycle is driven by the solar dynamo—the flowing, electrically charged gas within the sun that generates its magnetic field—and that magnetic fluctuations trigger solar explosions. But which of the many dynamo models is right is uncertain,said solar physicist Paul Charbonneau of the University of Montreal.Shedding light on the solar dynamo could help predict when solar explosions happen, which can endanger astronauts and satellites in space and damage power lines on Earth, Charbonneau said. But whether or not scientists can ever predict the solar cycle remains unknown—some claim it is physically impossible to predict.

The super-hot corona

Just as a fire feels warmer the closer one gets to it, so is the core of the sun hotter than its surface. Mysteriously, however, the corona—the sun's atmosphere—is also far hotter than its surface.The sun's surface is roughly 5,500 degrees Celsius. The corona, on the other hand, is one to three million degrees C or more.Why the corona is super-hot is hotly debated. Some researchers suggest the sun's magnetic fields heat the corona, while others propose that waves from the sun do. I wouldn't be surprised if these mechanisms are at work together. They're not mutually exclusive, said Bernhard Fleck, project scientist for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.

The Maunder Minimum

Oddly, the solar cycle once seemed to go on vacation for roughly 70 years. Only 50 sunspots were seen during this Maunder Minimum between 1645 to 1715, as opposed to the expected 40,000 to 50,000.Research does suggest that similar phases of suppressed activity have occurred in the past 10,000 years, with the sun in such quiet modes about 15 percent of the time, Charbonneau said. Why these occur remains unclear, although there are models of the sun that suggest the solar dynamo can rev solar cycles up or down.Also, the Maunder Minimum coincided in part with the Little Ice Age, leading to debates over whether or not the sun was the cause of that past climatic shift or the current one the world is undergoing. The agreement of the majority of the scientists is that while the sun has had an influence on Earth's climate in the past, the recent dramatic change in climate is not caused by the sun but due to man-made greenhouse gases,Fleck said.

Erratic siblings

Most stars like the sun actually behave more erratically than our sun. More than half of sun-like stars either have cycles that are slowly increasing or decreasing in how active they are over time instead of remaining steady, or they're completely irregular,said solar physicist Karel Schrijver at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif. We don't really know why.NASA's upcoming Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft could shed light on the inner workings of the sun and therefore its siblings, Schrijver said, and therefore shed light on these mysteries.
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