Space weather and the coming storm

LONDON (Reuters) - The delicate threads that hold modern life together are dramatically cut by an unexpected threat from outer space, with disastrous effects.

It's the stuff of science fiction usually associated with tales of rogue asteroids on a collision course with earth.

But over the next two years, as the sun reaches a peak in its 10-year activity cycle, scientists say there is a heightened risk that a whopping solar storm could knock out the power grids, satellites and communications on which we all rely.

"Governments are taking it very seriously," says Mike Hapgood, aspace weather specialist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. "These things may be very rare but when they happen, the consequences can be catastrophic."

Hapgood said that solar storms are increasingly being put on the national risk registers used for disaster planning, alongside other rare but devastating events like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

The statistics support this, he said. There is a roughly 12 percent chance of a major solar storm every decade, making them a one-in-a-hundred-year event. The last major one was over 150 years ago.

SECRETIVE SATELLITE INDUSTRY

The threat comes from the magnetically-charged plasma which the sun belches out in so-called coronal mass ejections. Like vast bubbles bursting off the sun's surface, they send millions of tonnes of gas racing through space that can engulf the earth with as little as one to three days warning.

The geomagnetic storms they stoke can induce strong currents in national power grids that literally melt the expensive transformers that form the cornerstones of the system.

The failure of a large part of India's fragile power grid this week was not related to geomagnetic storms but it does give a taste of the chaos that can ensue. Trapped miners, stranded trains and hospitals plunged into darkness, and this is a country where up to 40 percent of the population is not connected to the national grid.

Scientists say satellites can also be damaged or destroyed, as charged particles rip through them at hundreds of miles per second. It's an issue the satellite industry is not keen to talk openly about.

"A few will still publicly deny that there is a problem," said Hapgood, blaming the fear that being first to admit the problem could put a company at a commercial disadvantage.

"We have a way to go before we reach the point where the market accepts that this is a universal problem and gives the advantage to the guys who make a virtue of their ability to deal with space weather."

Radio communications with jetliners can also be knocked out as the solar storm messes with the ionosphere, the region of the earth's upper atmosphere through which long-range radio waves travel.

When there is a threat, airlines re-route planes to lower latitudes where they are less exposed. It's not quite routine but it isn't that rare either, and it adds to the fuel bill.

CHEER UP, IT MIGHT NEVER HAPPEN

It's a threat that is 'low frequency, high severity' in insurance industry jargon, which governments have only recently started taking seriously.

"Politically, it started to get some purchase about three years ago," says Andrew Richards, a severe risk analyst at National Grid, which runs the UK electricity network. "We know they are real effects but we are nowhere near there, in terms of our understanding."

Teams of scientists in North America and Europe spend their days and nights monitoring the sun and issuing warnings to governments, power companies, satellite operators and airlines.

But exactly how much to worry is unclear because proper scientific understanding about space weather is based on incidents and work done only in the last 20 to 30 years, the blink of an eye in solar terms.

In 2003, a magnetic storm triggered malfunctions in 47 satellites and led to the complete loss of one worth $640 million, according to the British Antarctic Survey, which this year launched an EU-funded space weather forecasting service for the satellite industry.

Before that, a 1989 storm was blamed for taking out the entire power network in Quebec, Canada, within 90 seconds that left millions of people without electricity for nine hours.

But the only really big storms that provide any meaningful reference point for how bad it could be, happened long before the development of nationwide power grids, the internet and mass air travel.

In 1921, a magnetic storm was blamed for putting the New York Central Railroad out of action and disrupting telegraph and telephone networks across Europe.

But the big one is known as the Carrington event in 1859, when British astronomer Richard Carrington observed and recorded a very large solar eruption that reportedly took just 17 hours to show up in the earth's atmosphere. The aurora borealis - or North Lights - were seen as far south as the Caribbean.

Local news reports carried accounts of people in the northeast United States being able to read a newspaper in the middle of the night by the light of the aurora, and miners in the Rocky Mountains waking up and preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.

The accounts are entertaining, but with about a thousand active satellites now in orbit around the earth, including the International Space Station, the damage from solar storms could present private operators like SES Global and governments with a bill in the billions of dollars.

NO RETURN TO THE STONEAGE

It is hard to quantify how serious and pervasive a sudden and complete loss of electrical power could be for a modern economy, but this is precisely what a 2008 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences tried to do. The result was alarming.

The effects of an extended outage lasting more than a few hours would include, it said, "disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure, and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration."

A separate NASA-backed report in 2007 estimated a Carrington-scale solar storm would cost the satellite operators a minimum of $30 billion.

That's without the loss of revenues to the telecoms and broadcasting companies that rely on them and the hole it could leave in military security networks.

Andrew Richards said National Grid started commissioning research on the threat around 1996 and the company now monitors solar activity on a daily basis.

"We want to be prepared if something did happen," he said. "There is a human tendency that if it hasn't happened for a long time, to forget all about it."

That rarity makes the risk hard to quantify. "It's very hard to say how bad it could possibly be," he says. "The sun could explode and we would all die, but modeling based on the most extreme events that we know of says we do not believe a catastrophic return to the stone age is on the cards."

WATCHING AND WAITING

Based on that modeling, Richards says the worst-case scenario is that the voltage fluctuations get bad enough to cause a local or national blackout.

To guard against this, National Grid has opted for a more resilient transformer design since 1997 and has increased the number of spares it keeps.

This is no small task. The transformers have a 30-year lifespan, cost 2 to 3 million pounds each and there are 1,500 of them in Britain alone. They are made by just a few global engineering groups, companies like Siemens and General Electric.

They run hot under normal circumstances but when a geomagnetic storm triggers an extreme voltage fluctuation the oil that insulates them can start to boil.

Richards said the record for replacing one of them is four weeks. "Imagine demolishing a family house, re-laying the foundations and then closing roads and bringing in a ready-made one on the back of a lorry. You can't do it overnight."

If the scientists raised the alarm, Richards and his sun-watchers would have a few days to get as many of the network's transformers into action as possible in order to spread the electrical load as thinly as possible when the storm hits.

Other than that, he said, "it would give us five or six days to sit and think, and worry about what might happen."

Aside from earth-based observation of the sun, one of the few detectors monitoring the 'solar wind' is NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer, which sits like a lonely sentinel about 1.5 million miles away in an orbit that keeps it directly between the earth and the sun.

Its detectors continually monitor the direction and speed of the solar wind, feeding data back to the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado, to give 15 to 45 minutes warning of any solar onslaught.

The insurance industry, which would take a hit, if satellites started dropping out of the sky, admits that the risk is a hard one to price.

Ludovic Amoux is a specialist underwriter at the world's leading space insurer, Paris-based SpaceCo, which is owned by Allianz.

"We have tried to analyze the probability... Our only concern is that although the probability is low, the impact would be huge," he said.

Thousands of fish die as Midwest streams heat up

In this July 26, 2012 photo, dead fish float in a drying pond near Rock Port, Mo. Multitudes of fish are dying in the Midwest as the sizzling summer dries up rivers and raises water temperatures in some spots to nearly 100 degrees. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Thousands of fish are dying in the Midwest as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees.

About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week as water temperatures reached 97 degrees. Nebraska fishery officials said they've seen thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, carp, and other species in the Lower Platte River, including the endangered pallid sturgeon. And biologists in Illinois said the hot weather has killed tens of thousands of large- and smallmouth bass and channel catfish and is threatening the population of the greater redhorse fish, a state-endangered species.

So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators.

"It's something I've never seen in my career, and I've been here for more than 17 years," said Mark Flammang, a fisheries biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. "I think what we're mainly dealing with here are the extremely low flows and this unparalleled heat."

The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation's counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states — as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken over the last month.

Iowa DNR officials said the sturgeon found dead in the Des Moines River were worth nearly $10 million, a high value based in part on their highly sought eggs, which are used for caviar. The fish are valued at more than $110 a pound.

Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, said the sturgeon kills don't appear to have reduced the supply enough to hurt regional caviar suppliers.

Flammang said weekend rain improved some of Iowa's rivers and lakes, but temperatures were rising again and straining a sturgeon population that develops health problems when water temperatures climb into the 80s.

"Those fish have been in these rivers for thousands of thousands of years, and they're accustomed to all sorts of weather conditions," he said. "But sometimes, you have conditions occur that are outside their realm of tolerance."

In Illinois, heat and lack of rain has dried up a large swath of Aux Sable Creek, the state's largest habitat for the endangered greater redhorse, a large bottom-feeding fish, said Dan Stephenson, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

"We're talking hundreds of thousands (killed), maybe millions by now," Stephenson said. "If you're only talking about game fish, it's probably in the thousands. But for all fish, it's probably in the millions if you look statewide."

Stephenson said fish kills happen most summers in small private ponds and streams, but the hot weather this year has made the situation much worse.

"This year has been really, really bad — disproportionately bad, compared to our other years," he said.

Stephenson said a large number of dead fish were sucked into an intake screen near Powerton Lake in central Illinois, lowering water levels and forcing a temporary shutdown at a nearby power plant. A spokesman for Edison International, which runs the coal-fired plant, said workers shut down one of its two generators for several hours two weeks ago because of extreme heat and low water levels at the lake, which is used for cooling.

In Nebraska, a stretch of the Platte River from Kearney in the central part of the state to Columbus in the east has gone dry and killed a "significant number" of sturgeon, catfish and minnows, said fisheries program manager Daryl Bauer. Bauer said the warm, shallow water has also killed an unknown number of endangered pallid sturgeon.

"It's a lot of miles of river, and a lot of fish," Bauer said. "Most of those fish are barely identifiable. In this heat, they decay really fast."

Bauer said a single dry year usually isn't enough to hurt the fish population. But he worries dry conditions in Nebraska could continue, repeating a stretch in the mid-2000s that weakened fish populations.

Kansas also has seen declining water levels that pulled younger, smaller game fish away from the vegetation-rich shore lines and forced them to cluster, making them easier targets for predators, said fisheries chief Doug Nygren of the Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism.

Nygren said he expects a drop in adult walleye populations in the state's shallower, wind-swept lakes in southern Kansas. But he said other species, such as large-mouth bass, can tolerate the heat and may multiply faster without competition from walleye.

"These last two years are the hottest we've ever seen," Nygren said. "That really can play a role in changing populations, shifting it in favor of some species over others. The walleye won't benefit from these high-water temperatures, but other species that are more tolerant may take advantage of their declining population."

Geno Adams, a fisheries program administrator in South Dakota, said there have been reports of isolated fish kills in its manmade lakes on the Missouri River and others in the eastern part of the state. But it's unclear how much of a role the heat played in the deaths.

One large batch of carp at Lewis and Clark Lake in the state's southeast corner had lesions, a sign they were suffering from a bacterial infection. Adams said the fish are more prone to sickness with low water levels and extreme heat. But he added that other fish habitat have seen a record number this year thanks to the 2011 floods.

"When we're in a drought, there's a struggle for water and it's going in all different directions," Adams said. "Keeping it in the reservoir for recreational fisheries is not at the top of the priority list."

Note: This is a guest post from Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Environment Group’s U.S. Arctic Program.

Oil industry plans to drill exploratory wells in America’s Arctic Ocean got off to an inauspicious start recently, when a Shell Oil Co. drilling ship slipped anchor and drifted perilously close to the beach at Alaska’s Dutch Harbor. A tugboat pulled the massive rig back into place, and the U.S. Coast Guard is investigating.

The mishap — along with a series of other troubling setbacks — raises a question that some of us have been asking for the past year: are we really ready to drill in such a remote and risky setting?

Arctic conditions are among the most extreme on Earth, including hurricane-force winds, high seas, impenetrable fog and shifting sea ice. Preventing an accident in such conditions is going to be far more challenging than anchoring a rig in the 35 mph winds and 4 foot seas reported in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, during the recent incident. If there is a spill in the Arctic, just getting people and equipment to such a remote location will be daunting: Dutch Harbor, 1,000 miles south of the proposed drilling site, is the nearest major port. And even then, there is no proven method of cleaning up oil in broken ice.

Fears of an oil spill have been countered by promises of robust prevention and cleanup efforts, as part of a bid to drill up to 10 exploratory wells this summer and next. But recent troubles beyond the near-grounding incident do not inspire confidence.

For instance, the Coast Guard delayed certifying the effectiveness and safety of such basic equipment as an oil-containment barge. Even at this late date, the Coast Guard has had to insist on fixes to the barge’s electrical, piping and fire-protection systems.

More worrisome still was a request that the Coast Guard lower the structural standards it had originally approved for the barge aptly named Arctic Challenger, from being able to withstand a “100-year storm” to a 10-year storm. If ever there was a place where preparing for the worst is prudent, it’s the Arctic.

Similarly, the federal government was asked to consider relaxing the drilling rig’s air emission requirements because not all of them can be met.

These last-minute changes are why we need Arctic-specific standards that are written into regulations, not negotiated on an ad hoc basis and subject to change from project to project or well to well. We need rules backed up by laws that will be in effect longer than one drilling season. And we need measures that can stand up to tough Arctic conditions such as this year’s unusually thick sea ice, which is wreaking havoc on drilling schedules and showing how unpredictable this region can be.

The recent near-grounding is a jolting reminder of just what’s at stake. The Arctic Ocean is home to bowhead whales, walruses, polar bears, and other marine mammals found nowhere else in America’s waters, as well as to millions of migratory birds. This unique ecosystem is central to the diet and culture of indigenous communities that have depended on its bounty for thousands of years.

We need the toughest standards to ensure that, if development takes place, this vital habitat and vibrant culture are safe from oil spills and other harmful impacts. But judging from the failures of planning and execution seen to date, we’re not there yet.

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