Railfan Technology > The "Carrington Event of 1859" (telegraph disruption)

A huge solar flare caused a massive aurora which disrupted telegraph traffic 160 years ago.
From the New York Times archives:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1859/09

The 'Carrington Event' and the 'Starfish Prime' Event have a lot of people concerned, mostly because of not knowing what we don't know. An EMP event has not gained much attention in common man discussion but is right up there near the top for those with a little bit more understanding of what can go wrong.

In modern terms exposed telephone lines, electrical transmission lines and railroad tracks ( note rail content ) have the same exposure as the old style telegraph wires. There are concerns about damage to less exposed electrical circuits as well, the theory that 'all' electrical powered devices will fail during a nuclear event is based on the Carrington Event and EMP's. In that theory any wound electrical wire component would generate a very large electrical pulse due to the sharp change in magnetic field, the windings are probably not in danger but whatever is connected to them would be severly stressed. Simple wires and circuit boards would have similar exposure to damage but on a smaller scale, most of the info is theory, I would think there's Government testing on this somewhere.

Carrington Event or solar storm of 1859 for Psuedo technical types:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

known EMP events and description:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

For those really into it:

http://spaceweather.com/  and  https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

That being said it's really not something for a quiet Saturday morning on a Holiday weekend.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/19 11:08 by TCnR.

The electric power industry is indeed worried about solar flares.  A major one could plunge large regions into a blackout that would take months to recover from, in effect sending us back to the 19th century.  The problem is that largest transformers are not made in this country and have long lead times.  Communications satellites are also vulnerable.  NOAA monitors solar activity and provides forecasts for the industries that could be affected.

Alerts for solar activity can be subscribed to at www.spaceweather.com. Free subscritpion to see what's going on with the sun and solar emmissions... By the way, if you go to the Archives section look up September 28, 2018. They predicted last winter's cold weather. Still waiting for their prediction fr this coming winter.

James Nelson
Thornton, CO
www.flickr.com/mojaveflyer



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/19 23:43 by mojaveflyer.

To be accurate, they predicted the temp of the upper part of the atmosphere, basically in outer space.  To say there's a direct correlation between that and weather is a bit of a stretch.  There is some connection of course, but long term weather prediction is nowhere near that easy or precise.

Maybe it's time for a new thread but this next winter's clues seem to have already presented themselves. The clues are not the typical data that everybody has been looking for, for example the NOAA El Nino vs El Nina thing is not available yet. The Industrial sized fishing people have spotted severly warm water off of Alaska and have compared it with previous years:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/the-blog-warm-water-mass-pacific-ocean-sea-life-14419059.php

+ Attached the only past raw data that I could find.
++ Interesting web page: https://www.climate.gov/maps-data

mojaveflyer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Alerts for solar activity can be subscribed to at
> www.spaceweather.com. Free subscritpion to see
> what's going on with the sun and solar
> emmissions... By the way, if you go to the
> Archives section look up September 28, 2018. They
> predicted last winter's cold weather. Still
> waiting for their prediction fr this coming
> winter.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/06/19 13:34 by TCnR.

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I've experienced one already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

Ray