The Royal Academy of Engineering released a report on Thursday titled "Extreme Space Weather: Impacts on Engineered Systems and Infrastructure," which called for the UK to prepare to defend itself against solar weather events. Solar storms happen pretty frequently in small bursts of radiation erupting from he surface of the sun, and are nothing to worry about.
Superstorms, by contrast, rarely interact directly with the earth (once every century or two), but if it does the consequences could be dire. The last solar superstorm, known as the Carrington event in 1859, caused telegraphs to fail, and sometimes even shock their operators. Telegraph paper spontaneously caught on fire while telegraph pylons shot off sparks-- and some still functioned despite being disconnected from a power source, according to Wikipedia.
The Academy points out several key risks in its report-- the reasonable worst case scenario, it said, is that the event could knock out the national electricity grid. Geomagnetic disturbances could damage grid transformers in England, Wales and Scotland that can take weeks or months to repair. It also estimates that local electricity would be interrupted for a few hours. But since the UK's electrical grid is laid out in a lattice (as opposed to say, Canada's, which is point-to-point with long cables in between), it is reasonably resilient.
Satellites, up to 10 percent of them, says the RAE, may experience outages and interruptions, but the impact is less significant due to the diversity and locations of most of them. Aircraft crew and passenger safety may also be at risk: the radiation-blocking effects of the atmosphere are diminished at high altitudes, and frequent fliers are already exposed to above-average levels of radiation. Given a solar event, passengers and crew could receive a dose of 20 mSc, twenty times the 1mSv limit for members of the public and three times the dose from a CT scan. "Such levels imply an increased cancer risk of 1 in 1,000 for each person exposed," the report said, though it also stressed that the average lifetime chance of cancer is 30 percent.
Electromagnetic devices, GPSs and mobile phones are also at risk (even if enough satellites survive, global navigation satellite systems will probably be down for one to three days), though the UK already has several measures in place to mitigate damage to cellphone service. Satellite phones will also be unavailable or have reduced transmission quality, and terrestrial broadcasts will also be subject to interruptions.
The Academy says that despite these risks, there's no need to panic-- the UK can cope with a solar superstorm, as many of its sectors are reasonably prepared, BBC reports. The report recommends that the government should set up a UK Space Weather Board to monitor and lead the initiative on dealing with space weather, and that it should work with international partners to refine this area of research.
Paul Cannon, chair of the academy's working group on solar weather, said in a press release, "Our message is: Don't panic, but do prepare - a solar superstorm will happen one day and we need to be ready for it."
