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But London could suffer a space storm during the games – causing power cuts, damaging communication satellites and forcing planes to divert.

London Olympics organisers admitted today they were ‘monitoring the situation carefully’ after the Met Office warned the next solar storm may occur during the games next year.

Chaos? London could suffer a space storm during the Olympics, potentially hitting the power supply, damaging communication satellites and forcing planes to divert

Weather experts told the Commons science and technology committee: ‘Extreme space weather events typically occur at the solar maximum, which itself follows a roughly 11-year cycle.

‘The next solar maximum is expected around 2012-13 — potentially coinciding with the London Olympic Games.’

It is only the most extreme solar storms that cause chaos, and Olympic organisers do not believe there is a ‘significant risk’ of major disruption.

Illuminated: The night sky in Eureka, Alaska, was lit up in 2003 after a solar storm hit the earth. The London Olympics could also be affected, the Met Office have admitted

Severe space weather struck in March 1989 in Quebec, Canada. On that occasion it also had an impact on British power systems.

In Sweden in October 2003 airline flights, power networks and spacecraft operations were affected.

A team of experts is working on how Britain would respond to a powerful space storm after scientists assessed the ‘reasonable worst case scenario’ in the next five years to be more ‘severe’ than previously thought.

The Government Office for Science and the Cabinet Office said such threats had now been included on the National Risk Assessment due to ‘indications that the severity of future space weather events may be much greater than those experienced in 1921, 1989 and 2003′.

The most powerful solar storm to hit earth was the 1859 Carrington event which was blamed for telegraph systems failing in North America and Europe.

The Met Office said that if a similar strike happened now it could cause national grid failure leading to power loss across significant areas for up to 12 hours, and up to several weeks if many transformers were damaged.

It could also cause the permanent loss of 30 per cent of satellites, leading to the disruption of communications, earth observation facilities and position navigation and timing services including GPS.

The Met Office added: ‘This would have a severe impact upon global and UK monetary systems which are primarily composed of electronic accounts and assets and rely on accurate timings from GPS to synchronise trades.’

A London 2012 spokeswoman added: ‘We are working with our partners and stakeholders to ensure that contingency plans are in place for all eventualities.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1344702/Freak-space-storm-triggered-solar-changes-scupper-London-Olympics.html#ixzz1jxakZ5Z5

What will happen? What causes this?

Causes and effects

True polar wander can be caused by several mechanisms of redistributing mass and changing the moment of inertia tensor of the Earth:

• Glacial cycles: redistribution of ice and water masses, and resultant deformation of the crust, changes the mass distribution around the Earth.
• Perturbations of the topography of the core-mantle boundary, perhaps induced by differential core rotation and shift of its axial rotation vector, leading to CMB mass redistributions.
• Mass redistributions in the mantle.

The orientation of the rotational axis itself could be changed by the high-velocity impact of a massive asteroid or comet.(Wiki)

Extinctions

Not long after the first geomagnetic polarity time scales were produced, scientists began exploring the possibility that reversals could be linked to extinctions. Most such proposals rest on the assumption that the Earth’s field has much lower intensity during reversals. Possibly the first such hypothesis was that high energy particles trapped in the Van Allen radiation belt could be liberated and bombard the Earth.

Detailed calculations confirm that, if the Earth’s dipole field disappeared entirely (leaving the quadrupole and higher components), most of the atmosphere could be reached by high energy particles. However, the atmosphere would stop them. Instead there would be secondary radiation of 10 Be or 36 Cl from collisions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere. There is evidence that this occurs both during secular variationand during reversals.

Another hypothesis by McCormac and Evans assumes that the Earth’s field would disappear entirely during reversals.

They argue that the atmosphere of Mars may have been eroded away by the solar wind because it had no magnetic field to protect it. They predict that ions would be stripped away from Earth’s atmosphere above 100 km. However, the evidence from paleointensity measurements is that the magnetic field does not disappear. Based on paleointensity data for the last 800,000 years, the magnetopause is still estimated to be at about 3 Earth radii during the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal.

Even if the magnetic field disappeared, the solar wind may induce a sufficient magnetic field in the Earth’s ionosphere to shield the surface from energetic particles.

Tests of correlations between extinctions and reversals are difficult for a number of reasons. Larger animals are too scarce in the fossil record for good statistics, so paleontologists have analyzed microfossil extinctions. Even microfossil data can be unreliable if there are hiatuses in the fossil record. It can appear that the extinction occurs at the end of a polarity interval when the rest of that polarity interval was simply eroded away.Statistical analysis shows no evidence for a correlation between reversals and extinctions.

Hypotheses have also been advanced linking reversals to mass extinctions.

Many such arguments were based on an apparent periodicity in the rate of reversals; more careful analyses show that the reversal record is not periodic.

It may be, however, that the ends of superchrons have caused vigorous convection leading to widespread volcanism, and that the subsequent airborne ash caused extinctions.

This all comes from studying past geologic records and fossil remains. How a subtle change will effect the environment and the planet is, at this moment, a best guess of anyone.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is known to be growing in extent and spreading westwards from South Africa, as the Earth’s internal magnetic field rapidly weakens in this region. This may be early evidence of a forthcoming reversal in the direction of the Earth’s internal magnetic field. We do not know in detail precisely what occurs during such reversals, including the changes observed in the magnetic field and the time a reversal takes to complete. However these factors are important in knowing where the radiation risk may be increased and how the atmosphere might respond.

Earth’s magnetic field has had many highs, lows and reversals in its past. The last reversal was around 800,000 years ago. So the Earth is known to be able to re-generate its field and has done so during human pre-history. Understanding the development of the SAA may therefore be significant in understanding the reversal process and its impact on life and the natural environment.

Check it out.. This article comes from the National Geopraphic and that’s pretty ‘mainstream’.

New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year.

Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State University.

At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century, Stoner said.

“It’s moving really fast,” he said. “We’re seeing something that hasn’t happened for at least 500 years.”

Stoner presented his team’s research at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting last week in San Francisco.

Lorne McKee, a geomagnetic scientist at Natural Resources Canada, says that Stoner’s data fits his own readings.

“The movement of the pole definitely appears to be accelerating,” he said.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE