Can You Survive A Major Solar Storm?

 

Living without electricity can put civilization back 200 years

We hear and read a lot about “Solar Storms”.
Most people however:

1. Are not sure exactly what a “Solar Storm” means
2. Understand what damage it could cause
3. Don’t know what the chances are that we may experience such an event

Here is an extract from http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov , explaining what a Solar Storm is:

Solar storms are a variety of eruptions of mass and energy from the solar surface. Flares, prominences, sunspots, coronal mass ejections are the common harbingers of solar activity, as are plages and other related phenomena seen at other wavelengths. They all involve sudden releases of stored magnetic energy, which accelerates the hot gases near the surface or in the corona of the Sun. Sometimes these particles make it all the way to the Earth and beyond by flowing along the Sun’s magnetic field into interplanetary space. When the material collides with the Earth’s magnetic field and trapped radiation belts, it can dump particles into our upper atmosphere to cause the Aurora. The same ‘charged’ particles can produce their own magnetic fields which can modify the Earth’s magnetic field and affect compass readings. The changing magnetic fields can also ‘induce’ electricity in long pipelines, or produce electrical surges in our power grids leading to brown outs and black outs.

Reading the explanation above, makes one realize the enormous effect such an event can have on all electronic and electric devices.
Pause for a moment and think what will happen if you do not have any electricity.  Traffic lights are down, water pump stations are down, shopping centers are dark, no lights, no escalators, no air conditioning …..
Yes, the list goes on.

Click ‘NEXT’ below to read more about the damage such an event can cause