Blackouts and Rainbow Colored Skies
I heard about a really curious incident while I was watching the Discovery Channel this weekend.
This sequence shows the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field that triggered the collapse and blackout of the Hydro Quebec system during the Great Geomagnetic Storm of March 13, 1989. Storm conditions (as measured by rapid rates of change in the Earth's magnetic field) are depicted over the time 7:40-8:00 GMT (UT). The Hydro Quebec system blackout occurred at 7:45 GMT.
A huge magnetic storm was responsible for the blackout. Basically, the sun's equator and poles don't rotate at the same speed as Earth's due, meaning lines of longitude are distorted. This creates a really volatile environment. A couple days before the morning of the blackout, the sun emitted a huge solar flare (energy equivalent-thousands of volcanoes erupting at once) and 8 minutes later our upper atmosphere was struck by enormous and powerful wave of radiation. The following day, an even more powerful eruption launched a cloud of gas from dead center on the Sun. The storm cloud rushed out from the Sun at a million miles an hour, and on the evening of Monday, March 13 it struck the Earth.
And, the "most newsworthy" consquence of this storm and the widespread blackout, the Aurora Borealis (aka northern lights) had seldom been so vivid, bright, colorful or vast (reports of the lights came from as far south as Florida and Cuba). 
"On March 13, 1989, at 2:44 am, a transformer failure on one of the main power transmission lines in the HydroQuebec system precipitated a catastrophic collapse of the entire power grid. The string of events that produced the collapse took only 90 seconds from start to finish. There was no time for any meaningful intervention. 6 million people lost electrical power for 9 or more hours." p.s. It was 8 degrees that morning and if the east coast of the U.S. didn't have a few of their own transformers, we would have lost power too.
This sequence shows the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field that triggered the collapse and blackout of the Hydro Quebec system during the Great Geomagnetic Storm of March 13, 1989. Storm conditions (as measured by rapid rates of change in the Earth's magnetic field) are depicted over the time 7:40-8:00 GMT (UT). The Hydro Quebec system blackout occurred at 7:45 GMT.
A huge magnetic storm was responsible for the blackout. Basically, the sun's equator and poles don't rotate at the same speed as Earth's due, meaning lines of longitude are distorted. This creates a really volatile environment. A couple days before the morning of the blackout, the sun emitted a huge solar flare (energy equivalent-thousands of volcanoes erupting at once) and 8 minutes later our upper atmosphere was struck by enormous and powerful wave of radiation. The following day, an even more powerful eruption launched a cloud of gas from dead center on the Sun. The storm cloud rushed out from the Sun at a million miles an hour, and on the evening of Monday, March 13 it struck the Earth.
now...for the art part of this...solar flares are stunning.
And, the "most newsworthy" consquence of this storm and the widespread blackout, the Aurora Borealis (aka northern lights) had seldom been so vivid, bright, colorful or vast (reports of the lights came from as far south as Florida and Cuba).
the aurora from space
posted by Amanda | 8:12 AM
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