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EI2GYB > ASTRO 01.09.21 12:17l 80 Lines 4003 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Massive Solar Storms May Shutdown Internet Around The World
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Massive Solar Storms May Shutdown Internet Around The World, Fears Expert
Solar storms or coronal mass ejections are known to cause damage to electrical
grids and cause blackouts, however, experts are of the belief that they
could also adversely affect the internet infrastructure, causing a global
internet outage.
This was revealed by the University of California, Irvine's Sangeetha Abdu
Jyothi at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference last week.
She revealed, in her research, that even though local and regional internet
infrastructure would be at low risk of damage during extreme solar storms
as they mostly use fibre optic cables and are not affected by geomagnetically
induced currents.
Even short cable spans that are susceptible to these storms are grounded
regularly, eliminating the possibility of damage.
However, the same cannot be said for undersea cables that connect continents
together.
Even though most of these continents are connected via fibre optic cables,
the repeaters that amplify the current at regular intervals are highly
susceptible to failure, and if most of these repeaters on a network go
offline, it could be enough to create an internet blackout in a particular
nation that only relies on the internet coming from undersea cables.
Abdu Jyothi said in a conversation with the WIRED, "What really got me
thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was.
There was no protocol to deal with it effectively and it's the same with
Internet resilience.
Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event.
We have very limited understanding of what the extent of the damage would be."
One of the main reasons this fear exists is because of the limited amount of
data we have at our hands.
The previously recorded severe solar storms include the ones that occurred
in 1859, 1921 and the most recent one in 1989.
During the 1859 event, even there didn't exist power grids like they do
today, however, historical literature reveals that the storms caused compass
needles to swing uncontrollably as well as many saw the aurora borealis --
an occurrence seen only at the poles of our planet -- in Columbia, at the equator.
The most recent solar storm that occurred in 1989 took down a Hydro-Quebec
power grid causing a nine-hour power blackout in northeast Canada.
And after seeing decades-long low-solar-storm activity, experts fear that
we could soon be on the verge of experiencing another massive solar storm.
Abdu Jyothi added, "There are no models currently available of how this
could play out.
We have more understanding of how these storms would impact power systems,
but that's all on land. In the ocean, it's even more difficult to predict."
Even though internet connectivity is designed in a way that if one pathway
fails, it has a way to reroute the network (at the cost of speed) and maintain
the connectivity.
Experts feel that with a massive outage, most of the grids could go offline,
limiting the internet to create the necessary link.
What do you think about going back to life without the Internet?
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