Originally posted by
Barbarella
Well it could be, but it isn't! Like most Wikipedia entries it pulls material together from various sources to (usually) get all the facts in one place.
The Carrington event for example was a well-documented incident and is familiar to well-informed communications engineers. The effects were very real, though not understood by the telegraph operators at the time.
Many similar but much smaller events happen during most solar cycles. The power grid companies are aware of the effects and have plans in place to try to reduce the failures of the distribution network. This is one of the reasons why studying the sun and space weather is so important to us now. The problem is we have no idea how often the earth gets directly hit by one of these massive CMEs. The best guestimation I heard was approximately every 400 years - but I have no idea how that figure was obtained.
Regarding EMPs destroying modern electronics, that's an interesting article. But some matters of note:
In the 1980s Racal communications had TEMPEST shielding on much of their military telecoms equipment. This has a number of purposes, but one of them is to protect against EMP. This was an expensive feature, and not likely to be developed for no good reason.
The Jim Stone article mentions EMP frequencies, but the effect is the massively steep electromagnetic wave front (the pulse) and energy it contains almost regardless of frequency. But it doesn't matter if it was only a very small band of frequencies. It the electromagnetic field is strong enough, it's the voltage induced in conducting surfaces of the electronics that does the damage.
What Stone also neglects to mention is that while an unconnected item of electronics may escape damage, in practice our whole society runs from the mains - which is in effect hundreds or thousands of miles of unscreened antenna criss-crossing the land. A weapon designed to put most its energy into the EMP would induce voltage spikes in these grid wires that would do untold damage - as anyone served by overhead wires will confirm when they get their router/modem/PC damaged by a nearby lightning strike!
Babs