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Doomsday Fear: Could an EMP Throw World into Chaos?
Friday, August 23, 2013 3:06
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If a nuclear bomb went off in the high atmosphere over the United States, it could possibly take out the electrical grids over most of the country. Likewise, a huge solar flare could create widespread devastation by knocking out electricity, experts say.
An electromagnetic surge from a solar storm is a more likely threat for an EMP. Generally, experts expect a bad solar storm to reach Earth about once every century.
The last time one hit the planet was during the Carrington event, when particles from a powerful coronal mass ejection overloaded telegraph wires and set paper messages on fire in 1859.
A coronal mass ejection is an enormous sun eruption of super-hot plasma that spews charged particles across the solar system.
Doomsday Fear: Could an EMP Throw World into Chaos?
At that time, the world was just beginning to use widespread electronic communications. Baker and his colleagues just submitted a paper that details a coronal mass ejection that took place in July 2012.
In that event, some 80 billion pounds of energized particles were ejected from the sun at a speed of several million miles per hour. Luckily it missed Earth.
But if it had occurred one week earlier, it would have been aimed directly toward our planet — with catastrophic results.
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