The “internet apocalypse,” as it’s called, has recently captured imaginations on social media, prompting quick-spreading misinformation about nonexistent NASA warnings and speculation about what the hyper-online might do with themselves in an offline world.
Virtually every aspect of human life is bound up in the internet, and its absence could have disastrous consequences — not to mention that many of us can barely stand a 30-second elevator ride without WiFi.
A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say.
When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica.
The solar atmosphere changes very slowly, says Stuart D. Bale, a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a principal investigator for NASA working on the probe.
Coronal mass ejections, expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields that can power damaging solar storms, occur over a short time frame and are probably a part of this mechanism, he said.
The original article contains 916 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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The “internet apocalypse,” as it’s called, has recently captured imaginations on social media, prompting quick-spreading misinformation about nonexistent NASA warnings and speculation about what the hyper-online might do with themselves in an offline world.
Virtually every aspect of human life is bound up in the internet, and its absence could have disastrous consequences — not to mention that many of us can barely stand a 30-second elevator ride without WiFi.
A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say.
When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica.
The solar atmosphere changes very slowly, says Stuart D. Bale, a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a principal investigator for NASA working on the probe.
Coronal mass ejections, expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields that can power damaging solar storms, occur over a short time frame and are probably a part of this mechanism, he said.
The original article contains 916 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!