Carrington Event of 1859

[Sailingsailor12]

The Carrington Event of 1859, a massive solar flare, knocked out most of the telegraphs in the USA and Europe. Today we depend on GPS for navigation. If such an event happened today would it take out the GPS System including the satellites and shipboard electronics such as quartz clocks and radios?

[roverhi]

The GPS was initially a military program would assume it’s been built to withstand an EMP strike whether natural or man made. Short of blowing up the satellites it will continue to function. What hasn’t been hardened are the consumer market electronics. If you are concerned about an EMP strike have a back up or two GPS’s and store in a Faraday cage to shield against radiation. Your boat’s oven may work as a Faraday cage but would want to get opinion from an EE on that.

If there was a serious EMP attack, failure of GPS will be a minor concern. Practically everything built in the last 15 years has unshielded electronics involved. Our world will turn to crap if an EMP hit, whether Natural or man made, should happen. Get a ‘Prepper’ how to manual and drastically change your lifestyle if concerned.

[Sailingsailor12]

RoverHi:

I was concerned about being in the Pacific, heading towards Hawaii, loosing all shipboard electronics, missing Hawaii, and running out of food, water, and fuel before I hit something. Thank you.

[Creedence]

That would be some fantastically lousy timing if it were to happen during your passage since it last occurred 162 years ago.

But if it’s an honest concern, that’s a great reason to pick up celestial navigation. It’s not too difficult, and could even be learned/perfected on the passage itself- would give you something to do on the trip!

[boatman61]

https://strangesounds.org/2021/05/ma...epare-now.html

[SeanPatrick]

Originally Posted by roverhi

If there was a serious EMP attack, failure of GPS will be a minor concern.

GPS time signals are used as part of many infrastructure systems. The loss of GPS alone would cause chaos in many ways, not limited to navigation.

Originally Posted by NASA

Astronomic observatories use time to record celestial events and to perform simultaneous observations at distant locations. Very long base line interferometry uses time-synchronized recordings from widely separated radioastronomy observatories to map celestial radio sources as though from a single enormous antenna. Electric power companies use frequency standards to maintain the 50 or 60 hertz line frequencies. Computer networks need to synchronize distant nodes for billing and communications switching purposes.Communications systems use both time and frequency to maintain carrier frequencies and data-bit phase timing. Military and banking communications networks have special timing requirements for synchronization of data encryption and decryption equipment. Frequency standards are required for radio and television stations, as well as for satellite communications transmitters. Tracking deep-space vehicles requires coordinated observations from synchronized ground stations. All of these users require some combination of precise time, time interval, and frequency that attains accuracies measured in nanoseconds (10-9 or billionths of a second).

[AiniA]

Originally Posted by Sailingsailor12

RoverHi:

I was concerned about being in the Pacific, heading towards Hawaii, loosing all shipboard electronics, missing Hawaii, and running out of food, water, and fuel before I hit something. Thank you.

If such an event happened it would not be business/life as normal. Simplest solution would be to turn around. North America is a pretty big target. People talk about celestial as if it is a panacea. On my first offshore passage from NYC to Bermuda we had cloud therefore no sights for the last few days. Amazing where can get LOPs, cruise ships passing for one. Used dead reckoning and RDF when close to the island. No one ever suggests that we should have radios with crummy antennas for picking up commercial radio stations.

[SeanPatrick]

BTW, a piece of "space junk" recently hit and damaged a part of the International Space Station. Everyone is okay and the station is operational. But it goes to show that there are more hazards up there than just EMPs.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by Sailingsailor12

The Carrington Event of 1859, a massive solar flare, knocked out most of the telegraphs in the USA and Europe. Today we depend on GPS for navigation. If such an event happened today would it take out the GPS System including the satellites and shipboard electronics such as quartz clocks and radios?

Originally Posted by AiniA

If such an event happened it would not be business/life as normal. Simplest solution would be to turn around. North America is a pretty big target. People talk about celestial as if it is a panacea. On my first offshore passage from NYC to Bermuda we had cloud therefore no sights for the last few days. Amazing where can get LOPs, cruise ships passing for one. Used dead reckoning and RDF when close to the island. No one ever suggests that we should have radios with crummy antennas for picking up commercial radio stations.

This paper indicates that GPS sats are being hardened against radiation and intentional EMPs which MAY equate to hardening against a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection such as the Carrington event.) https://fas.org/pubs/_docs/10072004163734.pdf

This paper indicates that such hardening against CMEs has been reported. https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/spaceweather.pdf

Let's assume that there is a CME that hits the earth full force. What happens?
A. GPS satellites have been hardened and survive to continue broadcasting.
B. Radiation and radio noise can overcome GPs signals for minutes to hours to days. Either accuracy is degraded or positioning is lost altogether.
-If you are in a tight pass and are not cross-checking with different navigational sources you may not know there is a problem until you go bump. At night it would be even worse.
-If you are well off shore and are paying enough attention to notice that GPS is not working or is degraded, no big deal, you have time to sort it out.
C. The effects which led to damage to telegraph systems in 1859 & 1921 could still occur. They were affected because there were very long (tens & hundreds of miles) conducting wires exposed to the magnetic and electrical effects of the CME. There is no longer a significant telegraph system with exposed wires, however there are electrical systems and communication systems will very long wires. Discussion of this is in the last link above. Assume that electrical service and wired communication ashore will be disrupted in the short to medium to long term (Days, weeks, months, or longer). To prevent such damage would involve significant, expensive hardening to the electrical and maybe communication grids which has not happened, or even been started as far as I know.
D. The ground stations required to keep the GPS system working probably have significant generating capacity of their own until fuel supplies become a problem. By that time you should have had time to reach shore so that's not a short term problem, but it might be a long term problem.
E. The electrical and magnetic effects are large scale and will only directly affect large scale conductors, the instruments and wiring on your vessel should be nowhere long enough to be affected.

So what do you need to do?

Short term you need to be cross checking your position with a second unrelated navigational system. Easiest is a depthsounder, magnetic compass and eyeball. That will keep you from going bump when close to land. To make this work you will need a plotting system that can plot visual bearings. Paper works. I would have close up charts of the major destinations you intend to make. OpenCPN may work for visual bearings, don't know, haven't kept my version up to date. Don't know about other systems.

If you are well out to sea and have been maintaining a log with positions, you can start dead reckoning from your last logged position. If you are under 1,000nm from say HI you should be able to hit that using DR. The smaller the target or the further out your are from it the less secure DR will be. Once you are within 100nm or so of your destination, heave to at night so you don't accidentally hit it when you want' see it. Yes that is a slower way to proceed, an safer.

If you feel up to the challenge there are some very easy celestial techniques you can use. With a sextant and a calendar you can determine your latitude every noon. In the old days a lot of ship would sail up or down the the destination latitude then east or west until they arrived.
With a watch you can determine your longitude just by shooting the sun repeatedly near noon every day. Start with this book:
https://www.amazon.com/GPS-Backup-Ma.../dp/0914025600

You can put together a decent celestial system for about $200 including all equipment cases.

The odds of being struck by lightning are more of a concern to me which could destroy all electronics on the boat including watches. I would put my back up electronics in a Ziploc bag inside of a metal case (steel or other ferrus metal). Together these act as a cage to protect what is inside against electrical and magnetic damage. There are no guarantees during a lightning strike but this will improve your odds.

Turning around and going back will depend on how far along you are, prevailing winds, how small your destination is, how much supplies you still have and a number of other things.

In the event of a CME strike that takes down the electrical grid, count on living on the boat for a while after reaching shore if it has significant solar and wind generating capacity and your locale is reasonably warm. If you return to your landside home it may not have power to provide many of the services you expect, cooking, water, sewer, heat....

[JPA Cate]

Originally Posted by Sailingsailor12

RoverHi:

I was concerned about being in the Pacific, heading towards Hawaii, loosing all shipboard electronics, missing Hawaii, and running out of food, water, and fuel before I hit something. Thank you.

Start out by determining whether or not you are east or west of Hawaii. If east, look for con-trails from aircraft and follow them to Honolulu. Military aircraft should still be flying. Pearl's a huge base. North or South, guesstimate where Pearl will be. Sail up or down your longitude till you guess you are at their latitude. No matter what the EMP did to the compass, if you set yourself along the aircraft's heading, whatever that reading on your compass now is, is your best guess. Stand off when you think you are near, and make final approach in daylight.

If you are west of HI, determine where the big island is located, the Island of Hawaii. Then use whatever compass you might have that you think you can trust, to set a heading to make your landfall around the SW corner of the Island, and then start figuring out what else you might be able to do.

You should be aware of your approximate position, your course and speed. Keep a deck log each 15 minutes, and record what the average course and speed have been for each of them, and keep it running. It will become less reliable over time, but it will give you an indication. When you arrive in the wind shadow of the big island, you will be in the lee, and it will be to your east. Proceed slowly in its direction, and when you see it, make your way around to Hilo, the entry port. You will feel much safer doing all of this if you teach yourself to do celestial. You will leave much safer distances off hard things, because navigation is no longer following the dotted lines on the yellow brick road. And you will get there safely. Again, though, Stand off until daylight to make your final approach. It is the hard bits that will kill you.

Ann

On edit: this method is very crude, and others will dump on it with justification, but if you happen to be cursed with a non-mathematical background and find celestial difficult to grasp, or, if it turns out that bringing the sun down to the horizon makes you seasick, it is a last ditch sort of effort to save yourself. Learning the celestial will help; and understanding the theory behind it is way better.

Ann

[sanibel sailor]

While I thought it seemed doable, my understanding is that longitude from a noon sight is quite inaccurate as it hangs at maximum height for a bit, making exact noon time hard to ascertain. I read that one can take the time of equal-angle sights before and after and split the time to get noon. Just my book knowledge.

[SeanPatrick]

Originally Posted by sanibel sailor

While I thought it seemed doable, my understanding is that longitude from a noon sight is quite inaccurate as it hangs at maximum height for a bit, making exact noon time hard to ascertain. I read that one can take the time of equal-angle sights before and after and split the time to get noon. Just my book knowledge.

Yes, and you can also take a series of sights before, during and after noon and plot them on a graph, then rough-in a best fit curve. Then just lightly fold the paper in half, hold it up to a light and match the am curve with the pm curve, crease, et voilà - the crease is noon. Still not super accurate, but probably pretty close.


Time sights are more accurate and not too hard with a calculator or tables.