Board logo

标题: 美科学家称2012年美国将倒退成发展中国家 [打印本页]

作者: 风雨声中    时间: 2010-5-15 23:13     标题: 美科学家称2012年美国将倒退成发展中国家

据英国《新科学家杂志》网站报道,近期,美国科学家发布了一份特殊报告,报告中预测了2012年9月22日将出现太阳风暴,分析称这可能引起一次地球灾难,90秒之后美国一些地区将陷入灾难危机。很可能美国会沦落为发展中国家,经济损失达数万亿美元,恢复可能需要4-10年时间,其破坏力远远超过“卡特里娜”飓风。

特殊报告称,2012年9月22日将出现90秒太阳风暴危机
2012年9月22日午夜时分,纽约曼哈顿上空将出现闪烁的彩色光芒,纽约市民很少会看到如此短暂而独特的类极光现象,这只有在南极才会看到。在短短几秒内,居民家中的灯泡开始变得昏暗并闪烁着,接着又变得不同寻常的明亮。之后灯泡就完全熄灭了。在90秒之内,美国东部一半的地区将陷入停电危机之中。
一年之后,数百万的美国人将陆续死亡,国家的基础性设施将濒于崩溃。世界银行将宣布美国变成发展中国家,欧洲斯斯堪的纳维亚半岛(瑞典、挪威、丹麦、冰岛的泛称)、中国和日本也将出现同样的灾难,这场灾难源于一次猛烈的太阳风暴——来自距离地球1.5亿公里之遥的太阳表面。

以上内容听起来会让人感到有些荒谬,许多人都会相信地球上不会出现如此悲惨的灾难。但是这并非是危言耸听,今年1月份,由美国宇航局提供研究资金,美国国家科学院发布的一份特别报告中很严肃地提出了“未来太阳风暴危机”。报告中指出,在过去几十年里,西方文化在迅速发展的同时也埋下了毁灭的种子,现代的生活方式以及所依赖的科学技术在悄然地把人类推向特殊危险的境地——来自太阳表面喷射的等离子球将摧毁我们的电网,并造成致命的后果。
美国科罗拉多州立大学的太空气候专家丹尼尔-贝克(Daniel Baker)负责起草这项研究报告,他说:“我们正在与可能出现灾难的边缘越来越近。”太阳表面释放着大量的等离子体——高能量粒子,它们从太阳表面逃逸以太阳风的形式在太空中穿梭。有时太阳风会携带着数十亿吨的等离子球,如果大量的等离子球进入地球磁场,将酿成毁灭性的灾难。

比卡特里娜飓风破坏力更强,往往发生在经济发达地区
等离子进入地球大气层将导致地球磁场结构的快速改变,诱导地面上较长电线的电网产生电流,其结果是导致变压器的铜线快速加热并被融化,电流失去控制。1989年3月,加拿大魁北克省就发生了类似的停电事件,600万居民在没有电的状况下度过了9小时。但更糟糕的事情还不仅于此。
在历史上最严重的太空天气事件发生在1859年,这就是著名的卡林顿事件,该事件是以英国业余天文学家理查德-卡林顿(Richard Carrington)的名字命名的,此次是由于太阳黑子造成的,持续了8天的恶劣太空天气。负责研究1859年卡林顿事件的美国宇航局行星部负责人詹姆斯-格林(James Green)称,虽然太阳表面爆发活动被证实非常强大可怕,但是我们至今仍未发现任何比卡林顿事件更恶劣糟糕的事件。基于对2012年所发生的太阳风暴事件预测,我们仍能幸存下来。但是我们将面临着两个问题,首先,是现代的电力网络,现代的电力网络都是以更高的电压覆盖更广的地区,虽然这提供了更有效的电网运营方式,但是也变成了最易遭受恶劣太空天气攻击的对象。较高功率的电网将变成一个非常有效的天线,引导巨大的直流电通向变压器。其次,电网系统与我们的生活息息相关,电网系统与供水和污水处理系统、超市物流基础设施、电站控制系统、金融市场等体系紧密联系在一起。如果将以上两种因素结合在一起,那么我们将会很清晰地意识到如果卡林顿太空天气事件再次上演的话,将引发世界上前所未有的灾难性事件。
美国科学院委员会顾问、加州梅塔科技公司电力工业分析师约翰-卡普曼(John Kappenman)说:“这与通常我们所想的自然灾难截然不同,太阳风暴往往袭击经济较发达的地区。”

太阳风暴灾难可能需要4-10年时间恢复

依据美国科学院的这份特殊报告,严重的太空天气将在美国境内诱导产生地面电流,从而在90秒内毁坏美国300个关键的变压器,切断了至少1.3亿居民的电力系统。出现的第一个困难就是饮用水问题,那些生活在高层建筑的居民,饮用水很难泵吸抵达,不久便会很快中断饮用水来源。由于停电也不会从水库中泵吸水。目前的状况并不仅仅是电力系统运输中断,同时没有铁路运输,地铁运输也停止;日常的生活用品也会消耗得很快,超市货架上的物品会很快销售一空,送递货物的卡车仅能在燃油未耗完前驾驶,当燃油使用完之后司机们也束手无策,加油站在没有电力的情况下无法从地下储油罐中抽吸燃油;对于医院而言,失去电力和饮用水,卫生保健和医疗抢救则无法进行。

真实可怕的事情是数个月状况没有得到改进,或许会持续几年时间,融化的变压器无法修复,只能更换。卡普曼说:“可能找到几个备用的变压器并不难,但是安装一个新变压器需要训练有素的工作人员安装一个星期时间或更长,然而一个大型电力基础设施之前可能只配备了一至两名工作人员负责日常维护。”
即使某些系统恢复了动力,但却没有保证能够此后不再出现故障。差不多所有的天然气和燃料管道的修复需要电力支持。燃煤发电站通常会存储供30天发电的煤量,但是没有其他的运输系统带来更多的煤,那么在第二个月该发电站将不再发电。

事实上,情况会更加糟糕。卡特里娜飓风所带来的社会和经济损失可达到810-1250亿美元。依据美国科学院研究报告,假设出现一次“严重的地磁暴事件”,很可能会导致高达2万亿美元的损失。并且这仅是灾难出现第一年所出现的经济损失,如果要从灾难中恢复需要4-10年时间,令人置疑的是如果面对这样的灾难,美国是否能复苏过来。

欧洲宇航局太空天气研究小组主席迈克-哈普克德(Mike Hapgood)说:“我并不认为这份特殊报告是散布谣言,科学家对于自然事件现象的研究分析还是比较客观的,他们的分析是经过认真思考的。这是一份公正的科学分析报告,值得人们引起高度重视。”
作者: 风雨声中    时间: 2010-5-15 23:16

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
New Scientist – March 23, 2009
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection. If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina
The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world’s telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, “we haven’t found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event”, says James Green, head of NASA’s planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. “From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we’d want to survive.” However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

The second problem is the grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. “It’s just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters,” says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. “Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions.”

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go – immediately for some people – is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly – delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites – but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. “From the surveys I’ve done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more,” says Kappenman. “A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two.”

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

Even when some systems are capable of receiving power again, there is no guarantee there will be any to deliver. Almost all natural gas and fuel pipelines require electricity to operate. Coal-fired power stations usually keep reserves to last 30 days, but with no transport systems running to bring more fuel, there will be no electricity in the second month.

Nuclear power stations wouldn’t fare much better. They are programmed to shut down in the event of serious grid problems and are not allowed to restart until the power grid is up and running.

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. “In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes,” Kappenman says. “Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order.”

Help is not coming any time soon, either. If it is dark from the eastern seaboard to Chicago, some affected areas are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from anyone who might help. And those willing to help are likely to be ill-equipped to deal with the sheer scale of the disaster. “If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse,” says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina’s societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

“I don’t think the NAS report is scaremongering,” says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency’s space weather team. Green agrees. “Scientists are conservative by nature and this group is really thoughtful,” he says. “This is a fair and balanced report.”

Such nightmare scenarios are not restricted to North America. High latitude nations such as Sweden and Norway have been aware for a while that, while regular views of the aurora are pretty, they are also reminders of an ever-present threat to their electricity grids. However, the trend towards installing extremely high voltage grids means that lower latitude countries are also at risk. For example, China is on the way to implementing a 1000-kilovolt electrical grid, twice the voltage of the US grid. This would be a superb conduit for space weather-induced disaster because the grid’s efficiency to act as an antenna rises as the voltage between the grid and the ground increases. “China is going to discover at some point that they have a problem,” Kappenman says…

The world will, most probably, yawn at the prospect of a devastating solar storm until it happens. Kintner says his students show a “deep indifference” when he lectures on the impact of space weather. But if policy-makers show a similar indifference in the face of the latest NAS report, it could cost tens of millions of lives, Kappenman reckons. “It could conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible,” he says.

The report outlines the worst case scenario for the US. The “perfect storm” is most likely on a spring or autumn night in a year of heightened solar activity – something like 2012. Around the equinoxes, the orientation of the Earth’s field to the sun makes us particularly vulnerable to a plasma strike.

What’s more, at these times of year, electricity demand is relatively low because no one needs too much heating or air conditioning. With only a handful of the US grid’s power stations running, the system relies on computer algorithms shunting large amounts of power around the grid and this leaves the network highly vulnerable to sudden spikes.

If ACE has failed by then, or a plasma ball flies at us too fast for any warning from ACE to reach us, the consequences could be staggering. “A really large storm could be a planetary disaster,” Kappenman says…

“The Carrington event happened during a mediocre, ho-hum solar cycle,” Kintner says. “It came out of nowhere, so we just don’t know when something like that is going to happen again.”  http://www.prisonplanet.com/spac ... om-catastrophe.html




欢迎光临 编程开发论坛 (http://bbs.lihuasoft.net/) Powered by Discuz! 6.0.0