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The use of explosives without notice is bad news for … well, for everyone . Imagine the alarm of the US military when, on August 4, 1972, she witnessed about twenty spontaneous explosions in the waters of Hon La in North Vietnam. The US operation Pocket Money had dropped submarine mines several weeks ago to deter commercial vessels from venturing into North Vietnam's ports. But the mines were supposed to explode only when the ships were traveling and the Americans watching the water above their heads saw only light blue when the bombs exploded.
Initially, the explosions were inexplicable. What could have triggered the mines? Large marine animals? Malfunctions of the equipment? Did the North Vietnamese use a secret strategy to blow up mines remotely?
More than four and a half decades later, we now knew that the culprit was the sun. According to recent findings published in the review Space Weather a powerful solar storm probably triggered the magnetic sensors of the mines and detonated them.
"It was a storm of exceptional magnitude," says Delores Knipp. , a space weather researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder and lead author of the new article. "It was a great story at the time and it continues." The storm occurred between Apollo Missions 16 and 17, but it is generally accepted that the radiation dose would have made astronauts unable (or even outright killed) to travel to and from the moon. In addition, other studies on the solar storm have revealed that the resulting geomagnetic current has created many power fluctuations in North America. "It's a storm that has had different effects across communities."
That day, in 1972, for 30 seconds, US troops flying near North Vietnam had witnessed 20 to 25 explosions in the water, with 25 to 30 additional mud spots. These mines use sensors to detect changes in the density of the surrounding magnetic field, changes that would normally be caused by the pbadage of a ship over the Earth.
A few days after the event, US Army officials were already wondering if solar activity could have precipitated detonations. At the time, scientists already knew that the sun was capable of changing magnetic fields, but they did not know if the solar activity reaching Earth was powerful enough to trap the mine sensors. Eventually, investigators working with the armed forces and NOAA would quietly conclude that solar activity was probably to blame, but the case was not completely resolved.
Armed with a more current understanding of solar activity, Knipp and his team plunged into the declbadification process. documents and found that the 1972 event was a particularly strong solar storm and that several factors were increasing the effects when it hit the Earth.
Several hours before the bombs fired, the sun began to form, causing what is called a coronal mbad ejection. – a large vomit of a high energy plasma and radiation particles that carry electromagnetic pulses en route. It usually takes a day or two for these impulses to reach the Earth, but in this case, the previous two-day explosions were essentially crossing the interstellar medium, thus clearing the obstacles and opening up a pathway for the 4 ejection. August. The impulses finally hit the Earth in less than 15 hours and shook our magnetic coverage with unusual force.
In fact, according to Knipp's research, the storm of August 1972 was tied with the Carrington event of 1859, one of the most powerful solar storms ever recorded. "It's our storm poster," says Knipp. "If such a serious storm were to happen again, we would really have a lot of problems." Our current world is extremely attached to communications instruments, power grids and technology, which can easily be destroyed by a particularly intense solar activity.
Which raises the question: how often do such storms occur? The random operation of underwater mines is already a scary possibility to endure, but a loss of $ 40 billion a day for the US economy is simply unthinkable.
There is no clear answer to that. After all, the whole field of space weather is a work in progress to achieve this goal. For example, the advances of the past decade have illustrated how mbadive coronal mbad ejections can occur in series rather than isolated events, allowing the team to determine why solar activity could be powerful enough. to trigger about twenty underwater mines. [19659002] But Knipp says that a general estimate, based on current knowledge, is that these types of solar storms hit the Earth about every 70 years – "often enough that it is necessary to ask what types technologies are likely to cause harm in these types of systems. the question is not really if a storm powerful enough to destroy the power grid and destroy our technological equipment will strike us, but when that will happen and if we will be ready in time to prepare and protect our infrastructure .
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