It pains me every time I hear someone complain that they lost massive amounts of work/personal stuff because their computer crashed. I nearly developed a facial tic when my barber told me, last week, that she has years of all her photos stored just on her phone.
Learn how to back things up, people! To multiple locations. I religiously back up my work at the end of each day to an external drive and to an even bigger drive, once every month or so.
Yet, even I’m not as fanatical as the prepper types who buy a metal rubbish bin, line it with plastic, stash it with vital electronics and data drives and bury it in their yard. I get the method to their apparent madness, though.
These are what are called Faraday cages. If you remember your high-school physics, “there is no charge inside a hollow charged conductor”. That is, a metal box can be alive with charge on the outside and safely neutral inside. It’s why your microwave has that metal screen across the door. A Faraday cage will even protect electronics from the electro-magnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion.
We don’t need the doomsday scenario of a nuclear EMP, though, to make Faraday cages handy for storing backup data drives. Not when there’s a four-billion-year-old continuously detonating hydrogen bomb right over our heads.
It is widely known that the main phase of a solar flare, a sudden event on the Sun that releases a burst of energy, can cause disruption to GPS signals and trigger radio blackouts across the globe.
The spectacular displays of aurora that so mesmerised everyone just a few months ago were the result of especially energetic solar flares belching massive waves of charged particles at the Earth. When those particles hit the Earth’s magnetosphere, the skies lit up. But, if a flare is sufficiently massive, the sheer deluge of cosmic particles can overwhelm the magnetosphere.
One particularly violent solar storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, not only caused astonishing auroral displays, but played havoc with the primitive global communications networks of the time. The cosmic rays induced currents in telegraph wires strong enough to make telegraphs work even with their batteries disconnected. Telegraph stations reported sparking equipment, even fires.
Now imagine a similar storm hitting today’s wired world. The preppers burying garbage cans in their backyards are anticipating not just nuclear bombs, but another Carrington Event. They’re not entirely nuts.
The new study found that the less-studied secondary emission known as the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) late phase could be equally as disruptive to communication and satellite systems.
The findings suggest that the energy in this late phase can potentially exceed that of the main phase due to its longer duration, leading to a more prolonged impact on the ionosphere – a very active part of the atmosphere, which grows and shrinks depending on the energy it absorbs from the Sun.
Of course, the impact of a solar flare depends on the bad luck of having intersecting the Earth’s orbit at the right time and even which side of the planet is facing the Sun at the time.
Corresponding author, Dr Susanna Bekker from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “The study of the influence of solar flares on the Earth’s upper atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, remains to be a significant focus.
“Studies have indicated that the illuminated part of the Earth’s ionosphere is extremely sensitive to variations in solar radiation fluxes, which can cause failures in technology that people rely on daily.”
Recent findings have shown that a large proportion of solar flares have an EUV late phase, whose influence is not yet as clear […]
Researchers looked at data from previous X-class flares to analyse the solar radiation and how the ionosphere responded to an EUV late-phase flare.
Dr Bekker explained: “During more powerful events, the effect on the ionosphere is much higher, therefore the late phase can also have a negative impact on the accuracy of navigation systems and the stability of radio communications.”
So, what should you do?
There’s no need to rush down to Bunnings for a galvanised bin, some builder’s plastic and a shovel. Any metal container can be a Faraday cage. I keep one of my backup drives in an old biscuit tin. To test a potential Faraday cage’s effectiveness, try putting a mobile phone inside then calling its number. If the phone doesn’t respond, it means the signal isn’t getting through.
If nothing else, back up your vital data regularly. External drives are pretty cheap and there’s plenty of free backup software (I use FreeFileSync) available.
Better to be safe than sorry.
