Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star" Dr.…

Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000


                                             Chapter 2
                                Dancing in the Light
                       "He knew, by streamers that shot so bright,

                        That spirits were riding the northern light."

                  'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' Sir Walter Scott, 1802




                January 7, 1997 seemed to be an ordinary day on the Sun.

        Photographs taken at the Mauna Kea Solar Observatory showed nothing

        out of the ordinary. In fact, to the eye and other visible wavelength

        instruments, the images showed nothing at all. Not so much as a single

        sunspot. But X-ray photographs taken by the Yohkoh satellite from Earth

        orbit revealed some serious trouble brewing. High above the solar surface

        in the tenuous atmosphere of the corona, invisible lines of magnetic force,

        like taught rubber bands, were coming undone within a cloud of heated

        gas. Balanced like a pencil on its point, it neither rose nor fell as magnetic

        forces levitated the billion-ton cloud high above the surface. Then, without

        much warning, powerful magnetic fields lost their anchoring and snapped

        into new shapes; their precarious balance between gravity and gas

        pressure, lost.

                The massive cloud launched from the Sun, crossed the orbit of

        Mercury in less than a day. By Wednesday this cloud had passed Venus:

        An expanding cloud over 30 million miles deep, spanning the space within


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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        much of the inner solar system between the Earth and Sun. At a distance

        of one million miles from the Earth, the leading edge of the invisible cloud

        finally made contact with NASA's WIND satellite at 8:00 PM EST on

        January 9. By 11:30 PM the particle and field monitors onboard NASA's

        earth-orbiting POLAR and GEOTAIL satellites told their own stories about

        the blast of energetic particles now sweeping through the solar system.

        Interplanetary voyagers would never have suspected the conflagration that

        had just swept over them. The cloud had a density hardly more than the

        best laboratory vacuums.

                The tangle of fields and plasma slammed into the Earth's own

        magnetic domain like some enormous sledgehammer as a small part of

        the million mile-wide cloud brushed by the Earth. Nearly a trillion cubic

        miles of space were now involved in a pitched battle between particles and

        fields, shaking the Earth's magnetic field for over 24 hours. The storminess

        in space rode the tendrils of the Earth's field all the way down to the

        ground in a barrage of activity. Major aurora blazed forth in Siberia, Alaska

        and across much of Canada during this long winter's night.

                The initial blast from the cloud (astronomers call it a 'coronal mass

        ejection' or CME), compressed the magnetosphere and drove it inside the

        orbits of geosynchronous satellites, amplifying trapped particles to high

        energies. Dozens of satellites positioned at fixed longitudes along the

        Earth's equator like beads on a necklace, alternately entered and exited

        the full-bore of the solar wind every 24 hours as they passed outside of the

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        Earth's magnetic shield. Plasma analyzers developed by Los Alamos

        Laboratories, and piggy-backed on several geosynchronous satellites,

        recorded voltages as high as 1000 volts, as static electric charges danced

        on their outer surfaces. It was turning out to be not a very pleasant

        environment for these high-tech islands of silicon and aluminum.

                The storm conditions continued to rage throughout all of January

        10th. Just as the conditions began to subside, on January 11th, the Earth

        was hit by a huge pressure pulse as the trailing edge of the cloud finally

        passed by. The arrival and departure of this cloud would have not been of

        more than scientific interest, had it not also incapacitated a $200 million

        communications satellite in its wake at 06:15 EST: Telstar 401.

                AT&T tried to restore satellite operations for several more days, but

        on January 17th they finally admitted defeat and decommissioned the

        satellite. All TV programs such as 'Oprah Winfrey', 'Bay Watch', 'The

        Simpsons', and feeds for ABC News, had to be switched to a spare

        satellite, Telstar 402R. The Orlando Sentinal on January 12 was the first

        newspaper to mention the outage in a short, 74-line, note on page 22.

        Three days later, the Los Angeles Times described how this outage had

        affected a $712 million sale of AT&Ts Skynet telecommunications

        resources to Loral Space and Communications Ltd. No papers actually

        mentioned a connection to solar storms until several weeks later on

        January 23, when the focus of the news reports in the major newspapers

        was the thrilling scientific studies of this 'magnetic cloud' . The New York

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        Times closed their short article on the cloud by mentioning that,



                "...Scientists said they do not know if this months event caused the

        failure early on January 11, of AT&T's Telstar 401 communications

        satellite, but it occurred during magnetic storms above the earth."



                The top news of the week wasn't the loss of a satellite, but the

        devastating earthquake, which had struck Mexico City at 2:30 PM on

        January 10th and cost thousands of lives. This had come close behind the

        three million people in eastern Canada who had lost power a few days

        before the satellite outage. In Montreal, over one million people were still

        waiting for the lights to go back on under cloudy skies and sub-freezing

        temperatures. These were very potent human-interest stories, leaving little

        room at the time for stories of technological problems caused by distant

        solar storms. Although the news media barely mentioned the satellite

        outage, the outfall from this satellite loss reverberated in the trade journals

        for several years afterwards, extending far beyond the inconveniences

        experienced by millions of TV viewers. It was the most heavily-studied

        event in space science history, with no fewer than 20 research satellites

        and dozens of ground observatories measuring its every twist and turn.

        Still, despite the massive scientific scrutiny of the conditions surrounding

        the loss of the Telstar 401 satellite, the five month long investigation by the

        satellite owner begged to differ with the growing impression of solar storm

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        damage which was rapidly being taken as Gospel by the outside

        community.

                Although they had no 'body' to autopsy, AT&T felt very confident

        that the cause of the outage involved one of three possibilities: an outright

        manufacturing error involving an over-tightened meter shunt, a frayed bus

        bar made of tin, or bad Teflon insulation in the satellite's wiring. Case

        closed. Firmly ruled out was the solar disturbance that everyone seemed to

        have pointed to as the probable contributing factor. AT&T would not so

        much as acknowledge there were any adverse space weather conditions

        present at all. So far as they were publicly concerned, the space

        environment was irrelevant to their satellite's health. In some sense the

        environment was, in terrestrial terms, equivalent to a nice sunny day, and

        not the immediate aftermath of a major lightning storm or tornado.

                The reluctance of AT&T to make the solar storm-satellite connection

        did not stop others from doing so. In some quarters of the news media, the

        solar storm connection was trumpeted as a part of the satellite's

        malfunction in reports such as Cable Network News "Sun ejection killed TV

        satellite". Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, a much-read

        and respected space news resource, announced that Telstar 401,



        "...suffered a massive power failure on Jan. 11 rendering it completely

        inoperative. Scientists and investigators believe the anomaly might have

        been triggered by an isolated but intense magnetic sub-storm, which in

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        turn was caused by a coronal mass ejection...spewed from the Sun's

        atmosphere on Jan. 6".



                Even the United States Geological Service and the United States

        Department of the Interior released an official fact sheet titled 'Reducing

        the Risk from Geomagnetic Hazards; On the watch for geomagnetic

        storms' in which they noted in their litany of human impacts,



        "In January 1997, a geomagnetic storm severely damaged the U.S. Telstar

        401 communication satellite, which was valued at $200 million, and left it

        inoperable".




                At the same time Telstar 401 was awaiting its fate, high-speed

        particles from the cloud seeped down into the northern and southern arctic

        regions, steadily losing their energy as they collided with the thickening

        blanket of atmosphere. On January 9, at 8:00 PM EST, the darkened, but

        cloudy, northern hemisphere skies over Alaska and Canada were awash in

        a diffuse auroral glow of crimson and green which subtly flowed across the

        sky as the solar storm crashed against the Earth's magnetic shield. This

        quiescent phase of activity was soon replaced by a far more dramatic one,

        the cause of this is a completely separate set of conditions and events

        which play themselves out in the distant 'magnetotail' of the Earth.

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

                Like some great comet with the Earth at its head, magnetic tendrils

        trail millions of miles behind it above the nighttime hemisphere. At nearly

        the distance of the Moon, the Earth's field contorts into a new shape in an

        attempt to relieve some of the stresses built up from the storm cloud's

        passage. The fields silently rearrange themselves across millions of cubic

        miles of space. Currents of particles trapped in the shape-shifting field

        accelerate as magnetic and gravitational energies are exchanged for pure

        speed in a headlong kinetic onrush. Within minutes a beam of particles

        enters the Earth's Polar Regions, triggering a brilliant aurora watched by

        residents of northern latitudes in Canada and Europe. The quiet diffuse

        aurora which Alaskan and Canadian observers had observed during the

        first part of the evening on January 10th were abruptly replaced by a major

        auroral storm which lasted through the rest of this long winter's night.




                As the solar cloud thundered invisibly by, a trace of the arctic

        atmosphere is imperceptibly sucked high into space in a plume of oxygen

        and nitrogen atoms. The changing pressure in the bubble wall pumped this

        fountain as though it were water being siphoned from a well. Atoms once

        firmly a part of the stratosphere now found themselves propelled upwards

        and accelerated, only to be dumped minutes later into the vast circum-

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        terrestrial zone girding the Earth like a donut. Still other currents began to

        amplify and flow in this equatorial zone. A river of charged particles 5,000

        miles wide asserted itself as the bubble wall continued to pass. Millions of

        amperes of current swirled around the Earth in search of some illusive

        resting-place just beyond the next horizon. Like electricity in a wire, this

        invisible current created its own powerful magnetic field in its moment by

        moment changes as current begets field and field begets more current.

                The Earth didn't tolerate the new interloper very well. The current

        grew stronger, and the Earth's own field was forced to readjust. On the

        ground, this silent battle was marked by a lessening of the Earth's own

        field. Compass needles bowed downwards in silent ascent to magnetic

        forces waging a pitched battle hundreds of miles above the surface. The

        same magnetic disturbance that made compasses lose their bearings also

        infiltrated any long wires splayed out on telegraph poles, in submarine

        cables, or even electrical power lines. As the field swept across hundreds

        of miles of wire and pipe, currents of electrons began to flow, corroding

        pipelines over time, and making messages unintelligible. During the

        January, 1997 storm, the British Arctic Survey at its South Pole Halley

        Research Station reported that the storm disrupted high-frequency radio

        communications, and shut down its life-critical aircraft operations.

                By January 12, the bubble wall had finally passed. The electric

        connection between the Sun and the Earth had waned, and the Earth once

        again found itself at peace with its interplanetary environment. Its field

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        resumed its equilibrium, expanding back out to shield its retinue of artificial

        satellites. The currents that temporarily flowed and painted the night skies

        with their color were soon stilled. Meanwhile, man-made lights on another

        part of the Earth also flickered and went out for 11 minutes. In Foxboro,

        Massachusetts, the New England Patriots and the Jacksonville Jaguars

        were in the midst of the AFC Championship game when at 5:04 PM the

        lights went out at the stadium. A blown fuse had cut power to a transformer

        in the Foxboro Stadium just as Adam Vinatieri was lining up to try for a 29-

        yard field goal. It may have been mere coincidence, but the cause of the

        'mysterious' fuse malfunction was never identified in terms of more

        mundane explanations. The story did make for rather awful puns among

        sports writers in 30 newspapers as far away as Los Angeles.

                A gentle wind from the Sun incessantly wafts across the Earth, and

        from time to time causes lesser storms to flare up unexpectedly like

        inclement weather on a humid summer afternoon. The Sun constantly

        emits an almost imperceptible wind of stripped atoms, dragging into space

        long fingers of magnetism into a great pinwheel pattern spanning the entire

        solar system. The arms are rooted to the solar surface in great coronal

        holes, which pour plasma out into space like a dozen faucets. Just as

        magnets have a polarity, so too do these pinwheel-like arms of solar

        magnetism. North-type and south-type sectors form an endless and

        changing procession around the path of the Earth's orbit as old coronal

        holes vanish and new ones flare up to take their place. As the Earth travels

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        through these regions, its own polarity can trigger conflicts, spawning

        minor storms as opposing polarities search for an illusive balance. The

        sensitive magnetotail region trembles with the subtle disturbances brought

        on by these magnetic imbalances. Minor waves of particles are again

        launched into the Polar Regions as the magnetotail waves like a flag in the

        wind. Lasting only a few hours, magnetic sub-storms are nothing like the

        grand day-long spectacles unleashed by million mile-wide bubble clouds.

                The solar surface can also create storms that traverse interplanetary

        space with the swiftness of light. Near sunspots where the fields are most

        intense, explosive rearrangements cause spectacular currents to flow.

        Crisscrossing currents short-circuit themselves in a burst of heat and light.

        Within minutes the conflagration creates streams of radiation arrive at the

        Earth less time than it takes to cook a hamburger. In the ionosphere, the

        lethal rain of X-rays strips terrestrial atoms of their electrons. For hours the

        ionosphere ceases to act like a mirror to short-wave radio signals across

        the daytime face of the Earth. The ebb and flow of the atomic pyrotechnics

        on the distant Sun are reflected in the changing clarity of the radio

        transmissions. Soon, the conditions that brought about the solar flare-up

        just as mysteriously vanish. The terrestrial atmospheric layers slough-off

        their excess charges through chemical recombination, and once again

        radio signals are free to skip across the globe unhindered.

                As dramatic as these events can be as they play themselves out,

        they do so under the cloak of almost total invisibility. Unlike the clouds that

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"   Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        fill our skies on a summer's day, the motions of the solar plasma and the

        currents flowing near the Earth have much the same substance as a will 'o

        the wisp. All you can see are the endpoints of their travels in the

        exhalations from the solar surface, or in the delicate traceries of an auroral

        curtain. Only by placing sensitive instruments in space and waiting for

        these buoys to record the passing waves of energy, have we begun to see

        just how one set of events leads to another like a fall of dominos. It is easy

        to understand why thousands of years had to pass before the essential

        details could be appreciated.

                Over most of Europe and North America, let alone the rest of the

        world, fewer that two nights each year have any traces of aurora, and if

        you live in an urban setting with its light pollution, aurora become literally a

        once in a lifetime experience. In bygone years, even the urban sky was

        dark enough that the Milky Way could be seen from such odd places as

        downtown New York City. Every week or so in some localities, the delicate

        colors of the aurora would dance in the sky somewhere. Lacking our

        modern entertainments of TV, radio and the Internet, previous generations

        paid far more attention to whatever spectacles Nature could conjure up.

        For the modern Urbanite, this level of appreciation for a natural

        phenomenon has now become as foreign as the backside of the Moon.

        Most of the residual legacies of fear and dread that aurora may still

        command have been substantially muted, especially as our scientific

        comprehension of the natural world has emerged to utterly demystify them.

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Chapter 2 - "The 23rd Cycle:Learning to live with a stormy star"    Dr. Sten Odenwald ©2000

        More importantly, they do no physical harm, and it is in this specific fact

        that they have been rendered irrelevant.

                We     understand       very    well   the    calamities   that   volcanoes,

        earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes can cause. For much of human

        history, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have been civilization's

        constant companion with such legendary episodes as Vesuvius, Etna and

        Krakatoa indelibly etched into the history of the Western World. In the Far

        East, seasonal typhoons and tsunamis produce flooding the likes of which

        are rarely seen in the Western World. It wasn't until settlers expanded

        throughout the Bahamas, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of North

        America that two new phenomena had to be reckoned with: Tornadoes

        and Hurricanes. As human populations established themselves in the New

        World, our vulnerability to the devastating effects of tornadoes and

        hurricanes increased year after year.

                 Like the settlers to Kansas who discovered tornadoes for the first

        time, we have quietly, but steadily, entered an age where aurora and solar

        storms have become more than just a lovely but rare nighttime spectacle.

        During the last century, new technologies have emerged such as

        telegraphy, radio and satellite communication - and all of these modern

        wonders of engineering have shown consistent patterns of vulnerability to

        these otherwise rare and distant phenomena. The most serious disruptions

        have followed relentlessly the rise and fall of the sunspot cycle and the

        appearance of 'Great Aurora' which, as Table 1 shows, arrive every 10

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        years or so, and are often seen world-wide. Like tornadoes, we have had

        to reach a certain stage in our colonizing the right niches in order to place

        ourselves in harms way.

                Aurora are only the most obvious sign that more complex and

        invisible phenomena are steadily ratcheting up their activity on the distant

        solar surface, and in the outskirts of the atmosphere high above our heads.

        When great auroral storms are brewing, they inevitably lead to impacts on

        our technology that can be every bit as troublesome potentially deadly as

        an unexpected lightning storm, or a tornado.




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