The Dark Year | Edit ShortsCars

If you'd like, let me know:Do you want a summary of the surrounding episodes in Season 5?Are you looking for details on a different piece of media with the same title?
Prevention and PreparationAdvance Warnings: Organizations like NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center provide 12- to 72-hour alerts for CMEs, allowing grid operators to partially power down sensitive networks.Hardening Infrastructure: Utilities can install protective equipment and blocking devices on transformers to mitigate GIC flows.Emergency Readiness: Emergency management guidelines advise keeping supplies to sustain a household for at least 14 days independently of municipal services.If you'd like, let me know:Are you interested in personal emergency preparedness for your household?Do you want to explore the physics and detection methods of space weather?
EMPs, solar storms and the forces that could switch off civilization.

The Dark Year
EMPs, solar storms and the forces that could switch off civilization.

This is how the Dark Year began.

On a bitterly cold December night you look up from the glass canyons & sky bridges of downtown Minneapolis to see a new star in the sky. It fades quickly, but streetlights flicker and you hear car alarms going off. You don't know it yet, but in a minute the world will change.

You calm down quickly and resume your walk, bundled against the chill and thinking, -not for the first time- that you should have called an Über. The alarms keep going, more of them now, but it's just urban orchestra and you don't see anything happening. You settle into a relaxed stroll, deciding that life is hard enough without worrying about stuff you can't control and fuck it, it's been a hard week: Guinness with the boys down at Kieran's, that's the ticket! Maybe buffalo wings and banter, good craic to take the edge off.

Is it really craic if it's in an American city? Who knows, but you're looking forward to it.

Suddenly all the lights go out.

The car alarms and traffic noise are still there, but the visuals have gone; it's just headlights & starlight, and the sound of a million people holding their breath.

Something perverse makes you look up. The new star has disappeared and you're looking out of a canyon of silhouettes. It already feels colder.

After a minute you turn and walk home, slowly. The power will be back up in an hour, probably, and then it'll just be stories.

But it wasn't.

It was the start of the Dark Year.

1: Lights Out.

You never miss something until you lose it.

You might be reading this on a train, or over your breakfast cereal, coffee bubbling in the background. You might be listening to it in the car, or reading in a quiet corner of your factory, or a university, or a café or aeroplane or quietly in a dark bedroom, your thoughts backlit by soft screen light.

And in the crackling of the bacon or the humming of the rail, in the susurration of humanity and the roar of the city, you are dependant, totally dependent on energy. Whether it reaches you through a wall socket or a petrol engine your life is built on something almost alive, that is invisible to you, unappreciated like water to a fish.

Until it’s turned off.

There is a force that can reach out and remove the modern world, turning it off like a light switch, flick! and gone. We’ve never seen this force because it’s alien to us, an invisible killer from beyond the clouds, whether carried in a cosmic downpour of solar particles or in a sleek metal bus, thrown in a high arc and bent on nuclear destruction.

It’s called an electromagnetic pulse, and it’s more than a Hollywood cliché.

Precious: An extremely high voltage transformer.

On the 1^st of September, 1859, English astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching a cluster of sunspots from his private observatory when, just after 11 o’clock, two spectacular beads of white light appeared over the spots, and slowly vanished over five minutes. Having just enough time to fetch a witness to this event, Richard Carrington became the first person in history to record a solar flare. What followed would become known as the Carrington Event.

Aurora filled the sky across both hemispheres across almost the entire planet. Miners in the rocky mountains were roused by birdsong at 1AM, and, so intense was the aurora-light that people in the Northeastern United States reported that they could read newspapers by it.

But the real drama lay elsewhere, as the burgeoning but still primitive telegraph system across the wealthy world was thrown into disarray. Sparks flew from telegraph relays, operators sustained electric shocks and huge stretches of the system became suddenly inoperable. Some operators even found that they were able to continue conversations after turning off the power at both ends, powered by aurora-current alone.

What had happened was a massive coronal mass ejection; a stellar burp throwing a volume of charged solar plasma straight at us, taking about seventeen hours to make the crossing and hitting Earth’s atmosphere. This smacked into our planet’s magnetic field, inducing electric currents across the Earth’s surface in turn. The raising of electrical potential over vast distances is naturally connected by metal telegraph cables, allowing currents to flow through them and causing the curious chaos of the Carrington Event.

It was the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, but our sun throws them off regularly and it is certain there will be another, but our world has changed since 1859.

Firstly, the quantity of electrical ground connections, cables, grid networks and phone lines has increased the potential current transmission surface millions of times. -And secondly, our civilization is uniquely vulnerable to disruptions in our energy & communication system: Telegraph cables were important in the 19th century, but not that important. But today our networked world is entirely dependent on our electrical nervous system. If we absorbed a geomagnetic storm of this size again, and we couldn’t control its effects, it would be ruinous and felt by billions.

Composite image of a coronal mass ejection from the sun.

But, -whisper it now- a replay of the Carrington Event isn’t even the worst case scenario, for there are other ways to create a massive wide-area electromagnetic pulse.

Because it could be man-made. And deliberate.

2: Starfish Prime.

On July 9^th 1962, a Thor rocket launched from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, delivering a 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead to two hundred and fifty miles altitude; the largest nuclear device ever detonated in space.

What followed was unprecedented. The electromagnetic pulse produced by the high altitude burst was vastly larger than expected, overwhelming sensor equipment and making its effects felt over a colossal area. In Hawaii, almost a thousand miles away, telephone calls were shut down between the Hawaiian islands, burglar alarms went off and over three hundred streetlights were knocked out. A huge stretch of the Pacific became illuminated by aurora.

Just as worrying were the longer term after-effects, in which the detonation boosted electron intensity in the Van Allen radiation belt by orders of magnitude. These were far longer-lasting than scientists had anticipated and killed a number of satellites in the following months.

The reason for this is that an EMP from an exo-atmospheric burst doesn’t work like normal nukes. There’s no fire and devastation and little to indicate that anything sinister has just happened. Anyone beneath the blast won’t be cooked or blown away; they’ll look quizzically at each other in a state of confusion, which makes the events to follow all the more horrific.

The radiation pulse from a blast at extreme altitude like Starfish Prime causes a release of Compton electrons in the stratosphere and ionosphere. Unlike sea level air, stratospheric air is so thin that the mean free path of an electron is a thousand times longer, allowing it to spiral around the magnetic field lines of the Earth and set up a vast electric current. This current, covering a pancake-shape area fifty kilometres up and hundreds to thousands of kilometres wide, generates a giant electromagnetic pulse.

If Starfish Prime hadn’t been over the ocean: The E1 pulse area.

And what is worse is that a Starfish Prime-style blast doesn’t just create one pulse but three distinct phases of electromagnetic assault, each building on the one before:

The ‘E1’ pulse comes first: Powerful and extremely short-lived, it delivers and decays in nanoseconds and induces current in every strip of conductor long enough to support it, from antennae to control cables and window linings. Its sheer speed is capable of overwhelming many conventional surge protection systems, knocking out SCADA, communications and sensitive electronics.

E1 targets society’s brain first, but the rest of the pulse is coming.

‘E2’ is an intermediate length pulse similar to lightning, running in the microsecond to millisecond range. Surge protection systems are designed to cope with this kind of thing, unless of course they’ve already been damaged by the E1 blast. This targets society’s nervous system.

Finally and most insidiously comes the ‘E3’ pulse, similar to the Carrington Event of 1859. This functions differently to the first two and is caused by the deflection of the Earth’s magnetic field itself as nuclear plasma shoves it aside and subsequent heating causes a reciprocal rising of the atmosphere and field lines. The voltage induction created by this isn’t powerful, at a few tens of volts per kilometre, but it’s a sustained rise that can last many minutes, creating a direct-current effect in long distance conductors near the ground… such as power cables.

The ‘E3’ pulse targets society’s muscle, and as the rising current slowly accumulates down power lines it leads to overheating of the grid-scale transformers that control and supply our civilization’s energy. If this energy isn’t controlled, or the grid system is too blinded by the E1 pulse to counter it, it can ruin them. This is the most insidious aspect of the exo-atmospheric burst, because large grid-scale transformers are custom built bespoke items with a lead-time that can reach years.

Years!

And this means that the power loss could potentially go on and on…

3: Week one.

By the following afternoon, it had stopped feeling like a holiday.

You remember that moment like a death of something fragile, like hope, and it was turning the keys in your ignition that did it. The engine started, but a forest of warning symbols filled the dash and as you eased it out of the underground lot and through a barrier that needed man-handling, you realised that this wasn’t a normal power cut. This was something else, something personal, and its ghostly touch had even reached your car.

-You remember that moment, as you drove onto weirdly quiet streets, washed-out under winter overcast, because it made you think of the car alarms the night before, and the new star. At the time this had felt stupid, like superstition.

Well now here you are, a week in, and it doesn’t feel so funny anymore.

You look around your cramped tenth story apartment, and not for the first time question the wisdom of inner city living. The skyline threw long shadows as the sun sank, and the passing of the minutes are counted in the gloom at the back of the living room.

It had been fun at first. Weird and exciting, like a snow day; you’d met more of your neighbours in the first few hours than you had in two years of living here and everyone was helpful, sharing torchlight and optimism. Your phone even worked, sort of: There was a little bit of signal but no real data. You hadn’t bothered to call anyone that night, and by morning it was academic anyway; no signal, no choice.

No work either. After boredom had driven you up the freeway you found the plant closed and stop lights not working, and you took it carefully after seeing the first crashes. You drove home and ate ice cream out of a warming freezer, read a book, took a walk and stopped thinking about the star.

By day two you realised that ATMs were just ornamental, and your credit card had become an ice-scraper. You found a couple of gas stations with generators, half-stripped of food. You stripped them a little more, filled the tank and went home with your heart fluttering, like you’d just gotten away with something. When you got home the water pressure was starting to go down, and you went down with it, sleeping as the sun set. Checking your phone again and again, still nothing.

You remember waking in a panic that night and staggered blind to the bathroom. The taps yielded just a trickle, but you filled the bath, a few buckets and went to bed shivering. It was the smartest thing you’d ever done.

By day four, nothing. You took to the road with your mate John and just drove, letting travel-monotony and conversation numb you. He checked signal like an addict, finding nothing. The GPS still worked, weirdly, but the maps were stale and jumped around. You’d gone almost two hundred miles past shuttered shops and dead stop-lights. There were plenty of others on the road, just driving aimlessly.

It started to feel like another country.

You heard rumours. Something had happened, and it had happened everywhere. Some mad old bastard thought it was the Rapture. Another, a tired-looking middle aged fella, kept on talking about the hospitals. National guard trucks went by and you followed them with your gaze like cattle.

And now it’s now. Your room is dark and cold! So fucking cold. You cup water from the bath into a pan and heat it on a cute little campfire stove, the only way to stay warm overnight. Some company would be nice, but maybe not: You stink now, and everyone else does, too.

Your phone sits like an uplight in the middle of the floor, charged daily from your car and useless for anything else. It throws stark shadows. You think endlessly about leaving the city, like a record, looping.

The power stays off.

4: The Odds of Apocalypse.

This all sounds a little fantastical, so the questions we need to ask are the following: How likely is this to happen, what’s the likely outcome and are we preparing ourselves for it?...