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Extreme Solar Events

On 23 April 2008, the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills published its report on science budget allocations. During the course of the Committee's inquiry, we received a number of representations from different scientific bodies about the decision of the Science and Technology Facilities Council to reduce the budget allocation for ground-based solar terrestrial physics to zero. We received evidence from UK Solar Physics research and from the British Academy, but the clearest evidence that we received was from the British Antarctic Survey. I shall quote two parts of the British Antarctic Survey's evidence, in which it makes a case for not cutting the budget in relation to solar terrestrial physics:""Sun-climate links: researchers are becoming increasingly aware of links between solar variability and the earth's climate. It is critical that we establish the relative importance of solar-induced effects on climate change so we can predict more accurately the man-made influences on climate. The InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the current level of understanding is very low and Sir Keith O'Nions in recent evidence to the Public Accounts committee about the Halley research station in Antarctica asserted that the 'physics of the upper atmosphere there will be a very key part of climate change'."" It is therefore an odd decision to cut the budget. More importantly for the case I want to make, the British Antarctic Survey stated:""Space weather: solar variability has a very strong influence on the near-earth space environment, including large transient increases in the amount of radiation there. Such space weather events are frequent but intermittent and of varying severity, the prediction of which is an ultimate goal of STP research. They can lead to temporary loss of service from satellites, or even the complete loss of satellites worth about $300 million each. More than half of all space insurance is done through London and is worth $500 million per year."" The Committee went on to make a case for fewer cuts to the budget. The work had not been done, so we could not have known that a month later—on May 22-23—a meeting was held under the auspices of the Space Studies Board about the societal and economic impacts of severe space weather events. Such work comes under the national academies in the United States, which had been called together to discuss the impact of severe space weather. I have heard that National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded the project because it was concerned about the matter. NASA was particularly concerned about what became known as the Halloween storms, which took place in autumn 2003, when there was a large space storm and transformer problems in Sweden. Commercial airline flights were moved away from the Arctic region and the level at which commercial airlines were flying had to be lowered. The advanced earth observing satellite II has not been heard of since; it was damaged beyond repair after that space storm. At this point, it is worth discussing the definition of space storms, what the likely future impacts might be and how that should be reflected in the Government's response. Space storms are associated with sun spots—a cooling of the sun's surface—which are caused by bursts of magnetic knots from the interior of the sun. Associated with space storms are coronal mass ejections, which are essentially billions of tonnes of plasma composed of protons and electrons that hurl very quickly towards the earth. Coronal mass ejections travel at varying speeds depending on how big and concentrated they are, but they can travel up to 1,500 miles a second. They can travel at a considerable speed and they seem to happen every 11, 12 or 13 years. The largest such event was known as the Carrington event, which took place just under 150 years ago. The size of that event has since been studied and it turned out to be four times larger than any of the recently measured solar weather events. Richard Carrington was a British scientist and astronomer who first worked out the relationship between sun spot activity and the magnetic phenomena in the earth's atmosphere, such as the aurora borealis, the aurora australis and St. Elmo's fire, which sailors have known about for years. Richard Carrington worked out that such atmospheric magnetic events were related to what was happening on the sun. The 2003 event—and to a lesser extent the 1989 event, in which 9 million people in Quebec lost power—meant that the body that works with the national academies in the States sat down and discussed what was happening. I know that anyone who talks about space, cataclysmic events and potential disasters is not likely to be taken too seriously, but I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take the matter seriously. If there were a large solar storm of the strength of Carrington—there is no reason to believe that the event of 150 years ago was as large as space storms can get—there would not only be serious consequences for western society, but all societies that are dependent on current technologies. There are particular concerns that the magnetic impact of these storms would cause induced currents in step-up and step-down transformers. Direct current would be induced in systems that are meant to deal with alternating currents, which would saturate the magnets at the core of the transformers and melt the copper wire. Such a proposition is not theoretical; it is what happened in Quebec in 1989. The current systems are more vulnerable because, for greater efficiency, modern grids operate at ever higher voltages—for example, the Chinese have recently put in voltage systems that operate at 1,000 V. When the relevant bodies looked at the situation, they worked out what the impact would be in north America and China. They also said that the inter-dependability of the grids in Europe meant that we could have a serious catastrophe in Europe. For north America, they estimated that within 90 seconds of one of these events, 300 key transformers could go down, affecting 130 million people. The impacts are obvious to anyone who thinks about it: water that needs to be pumped up multi-storey buildings would stop; trains would stop; the underground would stop; and, because we live in a just-in-time society, a lot of industry would stop. It would be very difficult after a few days to get petrol to petrol stations, the back-up generators for hospitals could fail, and we would be in a serious situation. There have been attempts to estimate the number of back-up transformers, but there are very few. In any case, there are not many crews available to put in new transformers. Nuclear power stations would shut down if the grid went down. The Committee estimated that a Carrington-type event would have 10 times the impact on the United States of the Katrina hurricane a few years ago and would cost that country $2 trillion. That is a large figure, and consequences could be dire. When I tabled a parliamentary question, I was told that the Government were aware of the matter and that contingency plans were in place. I would be interested to know the answer to a question about timing. Again, this is covered in the National Academies report. Much of the information about the timing and prediction of such events comes from the ACE satellite—the advanced composition explorer—which can get information to us in about 15 to 30 minutes. However, if the plasma were travelling as fast as it is estimated that it travelled 150 years ago, it would get here in 12 minutes, so the advanced warning would not arrive in time. The other satellite that can provide such information—it was damaged in the last solar storm in 2003—is SOHO, or the solar and heliospheric observatory. It, too, would have difficulty getting the information to us in time. There have to be particular circumstances for a Carrington event to happen. Solar winds and ejections of plasma happen from time to time, but the most difficult events involve plasma directed straight at the earth. In 2003, the largest ejection just missed the earth. The plasma has to be travelling very quickly, it has to be dense and intense, and finally—this is quite important—its polarity has to be the opposite of the earth's polarity. If it is the same, it just slips past the earth. It is like the difference between a knife going through water and an explosion in water. If plasma with an opposite polarity were to hit the earth's atmosphere, it would cause many problems. Given that there is no evidence that the current events are as large as they could get, and given the estimates that a large event could have serious consequences, I have two or three questions to ask the Minister. First, was it wise to cut the money going to ground-based solar-terrestrial physics, when one of the objectives is to understand the signs better and to predict events? Secondly, does the Minister agree with the National Academies estimates that the fastest of such storms are not predictable, and, therefore, that it would not be possible to take generators out of the system to protect them, and that we are vulnerable? The consequent question is, if something like that were to happen, are contingency plans in place for transformers and emergency services that go beyond the normal emergency plans that we have in place in this country? I look forward with interest to my hon. Friend's reply.