What Happens in 2012?

News reports earlier this year warned that solar storms coming in 2012 will cripple electric power, GPS equipment and communications systems for months, creating an electronic apocalypse not dreamt of since the days before Y2k hysteria gripped the world. Those reports have spread throughout a blogosphere already saturated with hype about the Hollywood disaster flick 2012.

The truth is more complicated.

Solar storms bombard the Earth’s magnetic field with bursts of radiation, which can in turn disrupt the power grid and satellites. In fact, “the great geomagnetic storm of March 1989″ zapped northeastern Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid, leaving millions of people without electricity for up to nine hours, according to a National Academy of Sciences report.

In a worst-case scenario, a solar storm could cause $1 trillion to $2 trillion in damage to the world’s high-tech infrastructure, the 2008 report said.

But the severity of the next solar storm is unclear, as is the timing.

Several years ago, NASA predicted that the peak in the next cycle of solar weather would occur in 2012 – a date that coincidentally aligned with other forecasts of doom. The space agency’s more recent prediction (made May 29) said the peak for sunspot activity will be in May 2013 – though additional revisions are expected.

So data center managers need to keep an eye on space weather, just as they keep an eye on terrestrial weather!

Hang on to your cell phone, a new solar cycle has just begun.

“On January 4, 2008, a reversed-polarity sunspot appeared, and this signals the start of Solar Cycle 24,” says David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Solar activity waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles. Until recently, we’d been experiencing the low ebb, “very few flares, sunspots, or activity of any kind,” says Hathaway. “Solar minimum [was] upon us.”

The previous solar cycle, Solar Cycle 23, peaked in 2000-2002 with many furious solar storms. That cycle decayed as usual, leaving solar physicists little to do other than wonder, when would the next cycle begin?

The answer is now.

The onset of a new solar cycle is significant because of our increasingly space-based technological society.

“Solar storms can disable satellites that we depend on for weather forecasts and GPS navigation,” says Hathaway. Radio bursts from solar flares can directly interfere with cell phone reception while coronal mass ejections (CMEs) hitting Earth can cause electrical power outages. “The most famous example is the Quebec outage of 1989, which left some Canadians without power for as much as six days.”

Air travel can be affected, too.

Every year, intercontinental flights carry thousands of passengers over Earth’s poles. It’s the shortest distance between, say, New York and Tokyo or Beijing and Chicago. In 1999, United Airlines made just twelve trips over the Arctic. By 2005, the number of flights had ballooned to 1,402. Other airlines report similar growth.

“Solar storms have a big effect on polar regions of our planet,” says Steve Hill of the Space Weather Prediction Center. “When airplanes fly over the poles during solar storms, they can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and computer reboots all caused by space radiation.” Avoiding the poles during solar storms solves the problem, but it costs extra time, money and fuel to “take the long way around.”

Much of this is still a few years away. “Intense solar activity won’t begin immediately,” notes Hathaway. “Solar cycles usually take a few years to build from solar minimum (where we are now) to Solar Maximum, expected in 2011 or 2012.”

On March 10, 2006 NASA researchers announced that the next cycle (cycle 24) would be the strongest since the historic maximum in 1958 in which the northern lights could be seen as far south as Rome, approximately 42° north of the equator. This projection was based on research done by David Hathaway, and Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).