Imagine what something like that would do to your PC or cellphone! The mother of all CME’s in 1859 took down every telegraph in the world, causing arcing, fires, and melted wires in the equipment. A CME hit Quebec in 1989 causing a nine-hour blackout and $4.3 billion in damages to the Canadian power grid. But if conditions are right, CME’s can do a lot of damage.
Many CME’s don’t even make it as far as the Earth. CME’s aren’t intrinsically aimed at the Earth and could just as easily dissipate into empty space. That’s a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME.ĬME’s come in various sizes and velocities. Remember how in Ghostbusters they weren’t supposed to allow the beams from their nuclear-powered ghost guns to cross? Well there are similar magnetic beams that emerge from sunspots and solar flares and if two of those with opposite polarities should happen to cross, a magnetic burp follows, ejecting millions of tons of magnetically charged material from the Sun’s corona headed toward the Earth at speeds up to two million miles-per-hour. Here, simply to infuriate space scientists everywhere, is my simplistic explanation of a CME. No more satellite navigation, no more cable TV. Basically we are headed toward a peak of sunspot activity in 2012 or so that could well trigger a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that could take out half or more of all geosynchronous satellites, not just GPS. A lot could happen, but nothing must happen.
That’s the way it is with these things, you know. The first of these is that the GPS system is vulnerable to a catastrophic solar storm and we have reason to believe such a storm might be coming between now and 2013. This week, however, I heard from a retired communication engineer who lectured me at great length about my various failings as a human being, but in the process made a couple points that I have to concede are correct. I just didn’t see this as a big deal and said so. Air Force can’t launch new satellites fast enough to replace those that are dying. I wrote more than a year ago that a Government Accountability Office report was overblown, claiming a 20 percent chance of the GPS system going down in the next few years because the U. This week, however, I was contacted by an upset reader who may well have a good point, so let’s reconsider for a moment the security of Global Positioning System - GPS. Typically they are complaining about something I wrote months or even years before, so I often confirm my idiocy by not even remembering what has them so upset. Nearly every day I hear from at least one person who thinks I am an idiot.
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