Dear friend,
As the sun brought a stifling heat to London last week, there was another stark reminder of the dangers posed by the great plasma ball in the sky.
A story from NASA reminded us that it has been two years since we narrowly missed a solar 'superstorm' – a scary sequence of events that starts with an exploding sunspot sending out a blast of X-rays and UV radiation, along with a stream of charged particles that can damage satellites and a cloud of magnetised plasma that would disable pretty much anything that relies on electricity.
NASA said that if the 23 July 2012 solar storm had occurred a week earlier, the Earth would have been in the firing line and the disruption to power distribution, communications and transport networks would have been immense. The National Academy of Sciences has reportedly estimated the economic impact of such an event at $2trn.
No surprise that such a scenario has been adopted for a movie starring Nicholas Cage.
It is a risk that the insurance sector is wise to. Catastrophic solar weather regularly crops up in lists of extreme risks, but it is worth revisiting some of the research:
- Space weather activity follows an 11-year cycle
- We are currently in a peak period of activity that runs from 2012 to 2015
- A general increase in solar storms has been observed since 1865
- At the same time, the strength of the Earth's geomagnetic field, which helps protect against solar storms, has been gradually weakening
- Between 2006 and 2010 there has been the lowest level of space weather activity for nearly 100 years
- One study has estimated that there is a 12% chance that a severe storm will hit within the next 10 years.
Does that make you think we are a little underprepared?
On a more optimistic note, various agencies produce space weather forecasts and we will have some warning before the most-damaging element of a solar storm – the magnetised plasma cloud – reaches us, as it take at least a day to travel from the sun. Start planning your mitigation strategy now…
Christopher Cundy
Contributing Editor, InsuranceERM
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