NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2010 Aug 03, 13:48 -0500
Thomas A. Sult, MD
Ike:
The Northern Lights are caused by atmospheric ionization, and solar flares significantly increase it, so there are many examples of the Northern Lights being seen below their usual latitudes due to solar flares.
But as a graduate electrical engineer, I have a hard time with "shorting out telegraph wires."
"Shorting out" requires either wires to stretch enough that they touch, or that the air or insulation separating them suddenly becomes conductive. I can not imagine how a solar flare could cause this to happen.
Do you have any reference material on how this solar flare "shorted out telegraph wires?"
Thanks
Lu Abel
From: Ike Stewart <ikes@LIBRARY.BEAU.ORG>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Mon, August 2, 2010 11:15:21 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: New inovation in astro navigation?
On the topic of solar flares and the potential for communication disruptions, there has been one major historical example, in September of 1859 there was a solar storm so intense that it caused telegraph lines to short out around the world, and the Northern lights to be seen as far south as Hawaii. Since then there have been numerous lesser examples, with isolated and regional outages, but few have occurred in last 40 years. So like many things in nature it is just a matter of when, not if.
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