In sci-fi movies, a weapon that can shut down life as we know it is a huge ass electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The cool thing about them is that they’re real. The scary thing about them is also that they’re real, and one likely source that could deliver an uncontrolled electromagnetic blast is glowing above us in the sky. It’s done it before, and it will almost inevitably do it again.
If it happens, we might have to turn our cell phones back on.
(This was seriously oversold to me in The Matrix, too).
Today’s Moment of Science… the Carrington Event.
As the Earth has Old Faithful, cicadas, and whatever Florida Man keeps doing to land in the news like clockwork, the sun has shit that happens on its own fucktangular cycle too. The solar cycle typically lasts eleven years, during which time the incidence of sunspots and solar flares waxes and wanes. At the peak of this activity, the magnetic poles in the sun switch places.
Typically activity ramps up quickly for about four years and diminishes slowly over the last seven. The disruption to magnetic activity that accompanies sunspots typically produces an increase in solar flares. In the peak of a solar cycle, plenty of those solar flares are powerful enough to result in coronal mass ejections.
Coronal mass ejection (CME) is the most sanitized way to say “nuclear magnetic bullshit yeeting itself the fuck out of the sun and hurtling towards the Earth with zero concern for your gadgets.”
So, the Carrington Event.
We’ve been making observations on solar cycles for 400 years, and they became more formalized in 1755, marking solar cycle 1. By cycle 10 in the 1850s, Richard Carrington was an accomplished English astronomer focused on making observations on the sun. He catalogued well over 3,000 stars in the 1850s, and realized astronomers sorely lacked substantial observations of our own star. He discovered that the equator of the sun accelerates faster than the poles. He also observed that sunspot zones tend to move towards the equator of the star through the course of the solar cycle.
On September 1st, 1859, Carrington was looking for sunspots and he saw something he couldn’t have expected: a bright white flash, the first observed solar flare.
For two days shit went bonkers.
I don’t know if this is an exaggeration, but apparently aurorae were produced that could be seen in the tropics. In some northern parts of the US, you could read at night from the brilliance of the northern lights. The earth got an absofuckinglutely spectacular light show.
And just a bit of an electronic shitshow.
This was the era of telegraphs, and it wasn’t a worldwide network yet. Local networks in North America and Europe were hit goddamn hard. Sparks flew, telegraph paper caught fire, and telegraph operators were hit with electrical shocks. Operators were likely dismayed as to why some telegraph equipment had been completely disconnected from power yet was still functioning and receiving messages.
Fucking yikes.
But everything was… fine?
Looking back at the event, no loss of life, no long term health effects, no major issues that could be found from the radiation. Disruptive, for sure. Scary. But not exactly the disaster I expected after reading a pile of articles.
Oh, you’re worried about “what if that happens again,” right? Because everything runs on electricity now and what’s gonna happen to your GPS and the space station and your bluetooth enabled vibrator that plays Don’t Let Me Down?
We’ve had a bunch of these since then and, uh, most of you don’t remember most of them.
In 1989 there was a pretty substantial CME. Electricity was knocked out for nine hours in a lot of Quebec. Do you remember the Halloween storm of 2003? Neither do I, and I was a grown human when that happened. It was big enough to produce a brief power failure in Sweden and there were aurora sightings in the southernmost states in the US.
It’s not that another CME like the Carrington Event couldn’t cause damages, because it almost certainly will. It’s that many countries have prepared for it after seeing the effects of some of the larger modern solar storms. Protections on the grid are more robust, and there are plans in place for everything from satellites to managing nuclear energy resources.
Richard Carrington’s connection of that white flare in the sun to the events of those two days in September won him the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society that year. His health started to decline in 1865, and he passed away just a decade later, a year shy of fifty.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, hoping to catch a glimpse of the northern lights eventually.
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