The Sun is constantly bathing the Earth in a haze of magnetized particles known as the solar wind. The good thing is that we are protected by the magnetic field, otherwise it would end up in incalculable damage, this terrestrial protective shield deflects the particles towards the poles where the dazzling northern and southern lights are produced.
A strong solar storm, expected once every 100 years or so, might catastrophically affect our modern life and plunge the world into an “Internet apocalypse”, warns new research presented at data communication conference SIGCOMM 2021.
In the research, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine and VMware Research assessed the robustness of the current Internet infrastructure in the face of such an extreme space weather event.
In short, a severe solar storm might plunge the world into an “Internet apocalypse” that keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time, wrote Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Abdu Jyothi discovered that long-distance fiber optic lines and submarine cables, which are a vital part of the global Internet infrastructure, are vulnerable to currents produced in the Earth’s crust by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) or also called solar superstorms.
“A coronal mass ejection (CME) involves the emission of electrically charged matter and its accompanying magnetic field into space. When it collides with the Earth, it interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field and produces geomagnetic induced currents (GIC) in the crust.” explained Abdu Jyothi.
“These currents can enter and damage long conductors, such as power lines,” he added. “In current long-distance Internet cables, fiber optics are immune to GIC. But these cables also have electrically powered repeaters at ~100km intervals that are susceptible to damage.”
There is already a record of these superstorms that caused significant damage in the past. In 1859, an incident called the Carrington interrupted telegraphic communications. And in the winter of 1989, thousands of residents of Quebec, Canada, were plunged into darkness when their electricity was cut off.
Since then, human civilization has become much more dependent on the global Internet and the impact of solar superstorms would not be uniform across the globe. The important point is that we must consider this risk when designing and implementing Internet infrastructure and applications, explains Abdu Jyothi.
“The economic impact of a one-day Internet outage in the United States is estimated at more than $7 billion,” Abdu Jyothi wrote in his article. “What if the network is down for days or even months?”
The research also mentions that the probability of such events happening ranges from 1.6% to 12% chance per decade and that modern technological advances have fortunately coincided with a period of weak solar activity.
“WE HAVE NO IDEA how resilient the current internet infrastructure is once morest the CME threat!” added Jyothi. “We have to rethink how we do resilience analysis on the Internet.”
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