Solar superstorms: the world is not ready for an internet apocalypse
Scientists have begun to ponder how a severe sun eruption could potentially knock out undersea internet cables
Arare severe solar storm could cripple the undersea cables that are the backbone of the global internet, causing widespread outages. Think of it as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all going down – and nowhere to complain about it. Sounds like a script for a sci-fi film, doesn’t it?
Although a rarity, there has been a lot of interest recently because of a presentation – titled Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse – at last month’s SIGCOMM (the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications) 2021 conference.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, put the fear of, well, no internet into the world by predicting what would happen if there was a very bad solar storm.
Also called a coronal mass ejection, these giant plumes rise up from the surface of the sun ejecting magnetised solar particles out into space. Although so rare that only three such severe solar storms have been recorded, the most recent (in 1989) caused a blackout for nine hours in northeast Canada when it knocked out the power grid.
The two other events were in 1921 and 1859, which knocked out electrical infrastructure and telegraph lines. Called the 1859 “Carrington Event”, the aurora borealis could be seen from the equator in Colombia.
“What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it’s the same with internet resilience,” Abdu Jyothi told Wired. “Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event. We have very limited understanding of what the extent of the damage would be.”
If that seems like scaremongering, remember all those seemingly overzealous warnings about a global pandemic?
Internet outages can be created by something as prosaic as a ship dropping anchor, as happened off the Kenyan coast several years ago. In South Africa, we regularly experience undersea cable interruptions; we’ve just become so used to bad cellular signal caused by load shedding that we’ve blanked it out, as it were.
And when Amazon Web Services goes down, so does half the internet because of the many firms using it for hosting.
But the scenario envisaged by Abdu Jyothi is potentially catastrophic, albeit more likely to affect cables in the higher latitudes, further from the equator, where the effects of a solar storm would be more damaging.
“We have more understanding of how these storms would impact power systems, but that’s all on land. In the ocean it’s even more difficult to predict,” she said, pointing out a lack of data about these scenarios.
The cables themselves are not susceptible to the solar storms, but the repeaters that boost the signal are. Depending on the cable, these repeaters could be either every 50km to 150km. That’s plensch of these on a few thousand kilometre cable, all of which would need to be repaired or replaced. That’s a lot of work for a cable ship, which would have to first lift the undersea cable off the seabed. It’s a big job, which could take months per cable if most, or all, of the repeaters were fritzed.
Solar storms themselves are beautiful events. As satellites have been able to capture increasingly better images, without the distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, we’ve seen awesome footage of these continent-high burning columns bursting up from the Sun’s surface.
We won’t be loving them nearly as much if they cause an “internet apocalypse”.
With the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it’s the same with internet resilience