The Earth will be hit by a powerful solar storm by mid-August (this year), capable of destroying power grids and restore the world, at least for twenty years, the age ' Middle Ages
According to a report in the British weekly New Scientist, a report funded by NASA and published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded in January that an American solar storm could happen relatively soon and have serious consequences for society ' human, totally dependent on electricity 'and technology.
"We we are getting closer and closer 'to a possible disaster, "he told the British magazine Daniel Baker, an expert on space weather University' of Colorado and chairman of the commission of that Nas wrote the report. According to scientists, in a year of intense activities 'of the Sun, as is expected will be able to' be 2012, could be violent explosions of the solar corona and the Earth could be hit by a wave of particularly violent solar wind. Contact with Earth's magnetosphere, the solar wind may cause geomagnetic disturbance that, according to the expert, to blow up power lines.
The last time there had been a particularly solar storm violent, in 1859, a giant northern lights had invested the Earth to the Tropics. In California, a group of miners had woken up thinking it was day, and instead it was two o'clock in the morning. But the world was not so 'industrialized and dependent on technology, and apart from some damage to telegraph lines, the consequences of the storm, called the disruption of Carrington, were not particularly serious.
But today things would be very different.
According to the report of Nas mobile phones and the Internet may have problems connecting , so 'as the radio and there may be problems of supply of electricity and water. Without electricity ' gasoline pumps nonfunzionerebbero so 'as nuclear power plants and coal, and the entire planet could be without power. Experts have calculated that to restart the system would require at least twenty years.
A solar storm, said Paul Kintner, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, would damage at least ten times greater than for a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina weather.
And just as with Katrina, said Kintner, "unlikely does not mean impossible." "The disruption of Carrington occurred in a cycle of activity 'solar mediocre. E' jumped out of nowhere. The truth 'and' we do not know quando una cosa del genere potrebbe accadere di nuovo", ha detto.
FONTE: Catastrofe.it
