Miyake Events

Note: I must state that this post is being made in good faith. At the same time, I do not have a background in Heliophysics and associated areas. And so and as always, I am very open to criticism.

Going with an extremely limited information that I have gathered, a ‘Miyake’ scale event pointing straight towards Earth could have not so great outcomes for civilization.

Intro

Solar Flares and CME - Coronal Mass Ejections are topics that we briefly looked at last year. As an aside, as of September last year I have been running with the two projects ASI and AUH in an individual capacity.

Difference between CMEs and Solar Flares

I still have difficulty distinguishing solar flares from CMEs. So here is an article that I Googled.

Initial set of concerns

• Initially, my primary concern was that there are safeguards in place for critical facilities.
• However, contingent upon the scale of the event, the events could be not so good for civilization at large.
• And so, going forward there may be a whole host of scenarios to consider and the outcome sitting on a spectrum. One between knocking civilization back by thousands of years (perhaps irreversibly - who knows) to one involving a controlled shutdown for the duration of the event. I would think that our collective human and machine civilization is not as focused on managing risks, existential of a nature. The outcome of scenario based exercises is what will highlight what the needs are going to be and at which scale. Meaning, contingent upon the scope/complexity of the event, what set of preventive measures need to be taken. As well, how are the needs of the population going to be me during such a phase or phases.

Continuing on:

• Initially, I started thinking about shielding of some sorts.
• Then I started thinking about atomic and nuclear facilities. Based on the information highlighted in the following link, there are 400 such locations around the world. I am not sure what the impact on the nuclear facilities would be and contingent upon the scale/scope of the event. My main concern was that there is sheilding for such facilities. As well, there is some manual ability in order to shutdown the plants in a controlled manner. I wrote to an institution that is local to Canada and I was advised that there are procedures for Canadian Nuclear Power Plans (should a solar flare occur). I am not sure about Nuclear Power Plants outside of Canada. But I am thinking that the responsibility for ensuring that there is protection would be with IAEA? What I do not know is if Solar Flares/CME are on IAEA’s radar.
• It would not be good if a massive solar flare and some other major cosmic event happened at the same time.

Article via SciAm

Shifting gears, more recently, I came across the following article via the Scientific American magazine link

The article is about ‘Superflares’, also known as a ‘Miyake’ event. The article was published in September last year (2021), but I only stumbled across it about 2 months ago. If you are opening links up, while reading this blogpost, then here is a tab that you may want to also open up. It’s the entry on Wikipedia for List of Solar Storms * The article and the corresponding entries via Wikipedia highlight the building up of certain elements. The signatures can be found in tree rings / Carbon-14 and ice-cores. ./ Beryllium isotopes. Beryllium 10 - to be precise

Article via Globe and Mail

In July of this year (2022), I stumbled across the following article via the Globe and Mail. link. There is a paywall involved and I access articles like these via the lynx browser. Here is an excerpt from this very article:

Most crucially, we can plan for the manual turning off of power grids, fibre-optic networks and satellites - effectively putting them into “safe mode” - before a major solar storm arrives. But a shutdown would have to be done as soon as we get a warning, for while robotic spacecraft stationed near the sun would provide one, it would arrive only a few hours before the storm itself.

Someone will have to make the tough but necessary decision to put the country on safe mode for about one week. That decision must then be communicated immediately to thousands of government and commercial operators. Last but not least, emergency alerts will have to be sent to the general public before power, cell networks and the Internet are turned off, to prevent unnecessary confusion and panic.