Solar Flares and Old Cars?

too true too true. Most of the buildings in Ghana where I lived are open air style (because the coldest it ever got in 11 months was like 15 C) In the building where I was living one Nigerian girls asked me how do we take showers in Canada?? I said how do you mean? She said, that it would be too cold to go from the showers to your room in the negative -35C whether.

I told her that we don’t tend to live in open air buildings. Could you imagine that?? I think I would die in that case.

Large solar flares occur frequently. The Aurora Borealis (sp?) is actually a storm of ionized particles from solar flares discharging in the ionosphere, whoch protects us from the effects of the flares.

While satillite communications can be interfered with from large solar flares, automobiles cannot.

As I understand it solar flares can damage electronics. In fact some flares in the recent past have damaged some of our and other nations satellites. Those in “the know” suppose to be able to verdict when any increase of solar flare activity may occur. They have expressed concerns that if we were subject to a massive series of flares it could “fry” electronics in most everything. AM radios are very susceptible to flare activity. Remember years ago we would hear nothing but static when there was a lot of flare activity. For the younger group, AM was the only radio years ago. 50 years before the iPod.

Unless it’s a large enough flare to push through the atmosphere?

You know that is REALLY interesting. I have always noticed that at night, as the sun wanes, AM station reception gets really crappy. Although you can also pick up stations from…like…Hobokan and Calgary! What the hell is up with that?

This happens to be vaguely in my area of expertise so here goes… sorry about the long post!

So, first off, if you look at a relief map of Idaho, you’ll notice the Lower Snake River plain in the south which looks basically like a giant line running from the Owyhee area of SW Idaho/SE Oregon/NW Nevada all the way to present day Yellowstone. The valley is almost exactly as big as the caldera in Yellowstone so it is obviously the hotspot track. The whole track is filled with much later basalt lava flows (such as those at Craters of the Moon) but these are only a few thousand years old (CotM could erupt picturesque Hawaii-style lava any day!) and their exact relationship with the Yellowstone hot spot isn’t quite clear. But by mapping minor variations in the local gravity and by analyzing the pressure waves of small earthquakes, they’ve been able to see through this material and they’ve found a series of calderas roughly the same size as the current Yellowstone one.

The ash flows from these can also be found on the margins of the Snake River Plain and these can be radiometrically dated. The oldest one, which is the one right about at the ID/OR/NV border, is about 17 million years old. This is the same date as the columbia basin flood basalts, which are the very thick basalts that cover most of eastern Washington and which also erupted from basically the same spot. These are almost certainly related, though how exactly is unclear. But this is probably the date and location of the first eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano so it never really had anything to do with anything further west, like the Cascades.

The rest of the calderas get younger as they move to the east towards present day Yellowstone. The rate and direction of these corresponds with other measurements of the rate and direction of movement of the North American plate so it has usually been claimed that the hot spot is stationary and the plate has been moving over it. (this is now the subject of a somewhat complicated controversy, but I can explain it and some of the possible origins of the hot spot if anyone’s interested).

The scary part of this is that the calderas are dated at an average of 600,000 year intervals and the last one was almost exactly 600,000 years ago. Granted, the variation from this interval is larger than the span of human civilization, but it is “due” and it’s just as likely to go off now as any other time and it’s 100% certain to go off in the next few thousand years.

As for the effects, the people who say “don’t have to worry, I never go there” are missing the point. The earlier eruptions have left tephras (the result of extremely hot debris clouds that run off the volcano) in about a 100 mile radius, so anything in that area would likely be dead, although there should be ample warning and time to evacuate this area. The extremely thick ashfall might kill some, since the practicalities of evacuating the area affected by these will be much more difficult (keep in mind this would be thousands of times the size of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption). But the real killer will be the fact that volcanic gasses and debris will essentially blot out the sun causing extreme global cooling for a few years. This, along with world-wide ashfall of varying thickness, will cause several years of failed crops and it is likely that a very large portion of the Earth’s population will die. The effects will last for many years so it’s not a matter of just stockpiling food and who knows what the societal effects of it will be. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare for that, so just hope it doesn’t happen.

To answer the question of what it looked like before the present activity, before the hot spot, it would have been like any of the other surrounding country. Immediately after the eruption, there would have been a massive pile of tephra, but this material erodes easily and so it would have worn down pretty quickly and other than occasionally being enveloped in glaciers during the various ice-ages it would have been pretty similar to how we see it at any point from 600,000 years ago to the present.

(I can also give you a long boring post about why the forces that have caused the Grand Canyon to uplift are different if you want)

An electro magnetic pulse would definitely be the closest thing to what the book described. While they were doing intensive nuclear weapons testing during the 50’s and 60’s they discovered a “side effect” of them was the EMP that destroyed transistorized electronics. In the 70’s and 80’s when research focused on limited or tactical nuclear weapons, they toyed with the idea of detonating nuclear weapons at very high altitudes with the specific purpose of making an EMP.

I always thought this would be an appealing stylized retro post-apocalyptic scenario because older cars with points-type ignition systems would indeed be immune. Domestic cars started regularly getting transistorized ignition systems in the mid 70’s so most cars before that would still work (although after the late-50’s the radios would be fried). Wouldn’t that make a great scene with all the new cars frozen in place on the highways and all the old beaters still running around?

I’m not really sure if this would be the same effect as a particularly bad solar flare or if such an effect was possible at all.

As an interesting sideline to this, in the 80’s when a Soviet pilot defected with the latest Mig fighter jet, the engineers who took it apart were amazed to find that all the navigation and targeting computers were made with bulky vacuum tubes. At first, they just chalked it up to commie design that was far behind the curve, but eventually they realized that it had been intentionally built with that way in order to survive an EMP.

Sooooo…your saying Cal Learner would pretty much not have to worry about the dirt bag with the loud subwoofer? HAAA!! Wow…what a great post. Not sure whether to be excited I live in AZ and find ways to generate power to fire lights to grow food…or convince a majority of my family in the hot zone to move here.

Had a bit too much Shiraz…and…a…couple, or so of Vodka and water to appreciate and fully analyze your post.

But…

in the same way an early poster pasted a pic of a Stanley Steamer…could you post the terrain pic (or better) from Google Maps of the region you mention cuz I noticed that too but of course you explain it great.

One hitch. I noticed a region to the east of Yellowstone that appeared similar…like an eruption/fracture zone that then depressed, about the size of Yellowstone also. But it’s east instead of west in line with the plate movement.

Here’s a good picture that shows the general context. It’s big so here’s a link:

Keep in mind the Yellowstone area has all been uplifted because of the heat from the mass of magma under it, so the terrain around that hasn’t been uplifted is generally not as high, although this is complicated because the hot spot is currently plodding through the central Rockies, which have some extremely tall mountains. I suspect what you’re looking at is just one of the intermountain valleys to the east.

Well I’m not going near Yellowstone-your right Mt.Saint Helens put ash in the air that settled out on the East (VA)Mt.Pinatubal cooled the summer of 1991? and produced spectacular sunsets.I dont worry about global warming because it is better then the alternative.
Maybe this disruption of communications-caused nuclear powers to try first strike which caused more EMPS?-kEEVIN

Wow, that’s fabulous. Really illustrates the movement well. Although it’s curvature through the Snake River valley is surprising. I would have thought it to be more linear. It would be interesting to see it continue further west to the coast…even under it if possible.

While I can’t answer your question with any authority at all, I will run it past my son as I will talking to him this evening and post back. He’s a degreed Meteorlogist, Climatologist, and a heartbeat away from a Doctorate in the field.
Solar flares and their influence on the Earth is something that he has studied a bit.

The alleged global warming issue is something that is almost laughable. Line up an issue, have the media flog it to death, and watch the uninformed and sheep line up behind it.
Dig into the issue and bit and you will see “experts” on TV talking about this issue that are not schooled in the Climatology field. Biologists, Botanists, Sociologists, Psychiatrists, Geologists, Oceanographers, Astronomers, Medical doctors, etc. but you will seldom ever see or hear from a Climatologist. Ask yourself, why is that.
Why not drag in the members of the Veterinary field while they’re at it.

(And for what it’s worth, almost every one of the “climate scientists” behind the U.N. IPCC report are not climate scientists at all, and that includes the top one.)

Would an older diesel be even better?

It would have to be an older diesel. My 1976 diesel could run without a battery, but my 2002 diesel would just laugh at me if I thought I could run it without power. It has more computers than Microsoft.

“But historically, large enough flares occur every few hundred years that are large enough to fry every electric circuit on the planet unless it were in an underground bunker.”

That’s why we study space weather. There are two or three Solar X-ray Imagers (SXI) watching the sun 100% of the time. When they see X-rays in certain energy ranges, there is a small amount of time to respond before the particle barrage starts. Satellites can go into safehold, and even electric grids on Earth can respond.

Here is some new interesting, and finally, empirical info at least from me. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm

Especially interesting the estimate that if the Carrington Event occurred today it would dwarf Hurricane Katrina in damage caused.

Stanley Steamer; beautiful. I thought of that and scrolled down; there it was. No kerosene powered radio?

(You can stay away from there I suppose and lay in some supplies and such)

re Yellowstone blowing: No, you couldn’t stay away or lay in supplies. Yellowstone is a caldera, and a big one; if it blew it would take out life on the planet, at least anything beyond deep sea, bacterial and (maybe) cockroaches.

This last is surely the most important question. A solar flare big enough to essentially torch the earth would surely be a rare event. The ones we would need to worry about are the far smaller more common kind, dangerous to electronics, microcircuitry, ferromagnetics and such, but not necessarily to low voltage electrics and macrocircuitry.

Born in 1942, by 1947 I was learning to read from a Green school teacher, who hammered on erosion and contamination of the planet. I saw dirty rivers and bad erosion as a small child.

Into my adult years, I also observed the erosion on my dad’s farm. I saw how gullies formed. And, I can categorically tell you:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE GRAND CANYON TO HAVE BEEN FORMED MILLIMETER AT A TIME OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS.

Around ten years ago, National Geographic printed a small article which told of evidence uncovered that the GC was formed rapidly when a large lake broke loose. If you know about gullies, you can look at photos of the GC and know it was brute force in a short period of time.

If you haven’t seen gullies form over many years, it is a waste of time to try to explain it in a short posting.

I believe that the Grand Canyon formed both by erosion and the growth of the Rocky Mountains as the tectonic plates in that area collided. The canyon grew up around the Colorado River as it slightly eroded the area surrounding it.