Solar flare detonated Vietnam mines in 1972

[MarkS]

Interesting story from around a week ago. 

A recently declassified document indicates that an extremely powerful solar flare in 1972 detonated a large number of magnetically triggered mines in the coastal waters of North Vietnam.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-storm-detonated-u-s-navy-mines-during-the-vietnam-war/
https://weather.com/news/news/2018-11-14-solar-storm-1972-vietnam-mine-explosion/

Luckily it happened between (and not during) the Apollo 16 and 17 missions.

Many other effects were also documented at the time.  One wonders what would be the effect of such a flare today on our present technologies?

Mark

[ApophisAstros]

Magnetic mines not withstanding , i personally think we will be fine ,there have been 1000s of these flares and how often have we noticed them or heard reports about something major being affected? To me its just like a super moon and global warning , overhyped and misreported by media,case in point the other night in the car on the radio they had people phoning in with info about stars and galaxies and one of them said that the andromeda galaxy was further away than ANY star what a load of duff , they actually read it out as fact.
Roger

[MarkS]

Magnetic mines not withstanding , i personally think we will be fine ,there have been 1000s of these flares and how often have we noticed them or heard reports about something major being affected?

Yes, we might had had "1000s of these flares" that we haven't noticed.  But this one caused aurorae in the south of England and was visible from Spain.  Such an intense flare hitting the earth is a very rare event. 

My question relates to what would happen if we were hit by one now.  Those reports were from serious scientific research and it's actually a very serious question.

Mark

[ApophisAstros]

 

[Carole]

I wonder what would happen if we had another event like the Carrington event of 1859.  Aurorae could be seen right down to the Caribbean, telegraph operators were getting electric shocks from their equipment and even when turned off they continued to operate.

Some of you may remember we had a talk on this, but for those who missed it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

According to Wikipedia there was indeed such a storm in 2012, but luckily it missed Earth. 

I bet it would knock out electrical grids, knock out the internet, and cause all sorts of mayhem.

Carole

[NoelC]

Well if you were worried about the internet, mine goes off when its foggy, let alone during a magnetic storm!

We would hope that the effect of the EMC directive will have hardened a lot of consumer stuff (as well as more mission critical bits of kit).  But large currents induced in long conductors (phones, Electric supply, train signalling, undersea cables even railway lines and pipelines) could give rise to widespread failures.  So your mobile phones should all work, just no power to charge them.  Satellites - well that's a different story a really powerful storm could fry half of everything in orbit making GPS useless, weather non-predictable, communications blackouts, market crashes and destabilizing the balance of power.    But it would have to be an extraordinary flare to do that.

[Carole]

internet, mine goes off when its foggy, let alone during a magnetic storm!

Blimey

[ApophisAstros]

Well if you were worried about the internet, mine goes off when its foggy, let alone during a magnetic storm!

We would hope that the effect of the EMC directive will have hardened a lot of consumer stuff (as well as more mission critical bits of kit).  But large currents induced in long conductors (phones, Electric supply, train signalling, undersea cables even railway lines and pipelines) could give rise to widespread failures.  So your mobile phones should all work, just no power to charge them.  Satellites - well that's a different story a really powerful storm could fry half of everything in orbit making GPS useless, weather non-predictable, communications blackouts, market crashes and destabilizing the balance of power.    But it would have to be an extraordinary flare to do that.

I suppose we have lived as a species for so long without these things before we had them and managed fine,how bad could it be?. I think we will be fine with or without them, funny how the rest of nature doesn't even notice these things and they do ok.
Roger

[MarkH]

Another angle to this just dawned on me. A really positive point, if it was a really huge flare and It was able to set off all the illegally planted mines on the planet.... It would save an awful lot of lives.