The Geomagnetic Apocalypse of 2012

There seems to be a lot of talk of gloom and doom these days, and the suggestion of a possible Geomagnetic Apocalypse in the year 2012, is not making the news any lighter.  The notion that solar flares could disrupt the Earth's magnetic field and completely short circuit the planets energy grids is admittedly freaky, even for someone like myself who's remains optimistic about ancient Mayan predictions.  What concerns me is how ancient and vulnurable our electrical grid currently is without solar flares getting into the mix.  Now, I'm not going to recommend that you don a tinfoil hat just yet(although they are pretty stylish), but it seems that some pretty simple adjustments can be made to divert the possibility of previously overlooked threat.  According to Wired Magazine's interview on the subject, by adding small, inexpensive resistors to the ground connections of electrical transformers, we could reduce the possibility of blackouts.

The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.

Sounds good to me!  Let's hope that those resistors are included in the stimulus bill's allotment of $11 billion to update the country's power grid.  And that there's some money left over for tinfoil hats.Photo: danielarnold!'s flickr photostream (creative commons)