The 1859 Carrington Event

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On September 3rd, 1859, the Memphis, Tennessee Daily Appeal reported on a startling event. On Thursday last, at about 12 o'clock, the heavens suddenly lit up as if by a half dozen moons. The lights were so bright that citizens assumed it must be a fire. The paper reports that the city fire bells were rung, but when the truth revealed itself, the paper writes it appeared that old nature had only lit up its own chandelier. The lights that were so bright were the Aurora Borealis. Although you can hardly fault people living in the Southern United States for not recognizing the Northern Lights, and while the citizens of Memphis might have been overawed by Nature's Chandelier, the paper doesn't give any indication that they really understood how extraordinary the event was that they were witnessing.

North's connection to the huge ball of gas called the Sun—the 1859 Carrington event, the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history—deserves to be remembered. Richard Christopher Carrington was born in Chelsea in 1826, the son of a wealthy brewery owner. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied astronomy and worked at the observatory at the University of Durham, where various observations earned him admission into the Royal Astronomical Society. But the quality of the equipment was limited, and he left in 1852. A man of means, he was able to construct his own observatory in Red Hill, Surrey. He took among his interests daylight observation of the sun. His observation of sunspots lacked, at the time, systematic observation. He devised a system where he could record sunspots by projecting the images from his telescope onto a screen and tracing out the features observed, because, of course, it's unsafe to look directly at the sun through a telescope. His works greatly contributed to the understanding of the elements of solar rotation.

On September 1st, 1859, while doing his observations of sunspots, he witnessed a peculiar event. The website of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration explains: At 11:18 a.m. on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1st, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington, widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers, was in his well-appointed private observatory, just as usual on every sunny day. His telescope was projecting an 11-inch wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensifying rapidly and becoming kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and being somewhat flurried by the surprise, Carrington later wrote, "hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear. It was 11:23 a.m.; only five minutes had passed.

Carrington was not the only astronomer to witness the event. British publisher Robert Hodgson was an amateur astronomer; he witnessed the event as well, using his telescope at his estate near London. Both men's observations were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. David Hathaway, the solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Space.com last June that what Carrington and Hodgson witnessed was a white light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the Sun. Solar flares are nothing to scoff at. The NASA website writes: "Solar flares, among the Solar System's mightiest eruptions, are tremendous explosions in the atmosphere of the sun, capable of releasing as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT, caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy. In just a few seconds, flares can accelerate solar particles to very high velocities—almost to the speed of light—and heat solar material to tens of millions of degrees." But at the time, neither man would have known what they were witnessing. Dr. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center notes on his webpage, "The Sun Today." Carrington had become the first person to ever witness a solar flare. Well, today we know solar flares to be quite common, with their frequency affected by the 11-year solar cycle. In 1859, they were not easy to detect. The NASA webpage explains: "Flares are, in fact, difficult to see against the bright emission from the photosphere. Specialized scientific instruments are needed; most betray their existence by releasing x-rays recorded by x-ray telescopes in space and radio noise recorded by radio telescopes in space and on Earth." In Carrington's day, however, there were no x-ray satellites or radio telescopes; no one knew when new flares existed until the September morning when one super flare produced enough light to rival the brightness of the sun itself. It was, therefore, happenstance that Carrington and Hodgson were both looking at reflections of solar activity at the exact time that the flare occurred. Still, typically, a solar flare would not have been visible, as most of the energy of solar flares occurs outside the visible spectrum, and few produce visible emissions brighter than the sun itself. Young explains that white light is only visible in the largest flares, and large it was. Carrington and Hodgson were not just viewing the first solar flare seen by humans, but also, Young notes, what has been estimated to be the largest ever observed in the 150 years since. And size matters.

Space.com explains that solar flares may produce coronal mass ejections, or CMEs—a burst of magnetized plasma from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona. Although not all solar flares produce CMEs, and the relationship between solar flares and CMEs is not well understood. While the light from a solar flare only takes eight minutes to reach the Earth, the plasma from CMEs typically, according to NASA, it takes several days to travel the approximately 90 million miles from the Sun to the Earth. But the CME that occurred along with the flare that Carrington and Hodgson had witnessed made the trip in just 17.6 hours, and the effects were dramatic. CMEs can funnel energized particles into near-Earth space and jostle Earth's magnetic fields. Those fields protect us by redirecting the currents towards the poles. The particles that can collide with atoms and molecules in our settler atmosphere, providing them with extra energy, which is released as a burst of light—the phenomenon known as the aurora, a term coined by Galileo Galilei in 1619 after the Roman goddess of dawn. These light displays in the north, called Aurora Borealis, and in the south, called Aurora Australis, can occur at any time, as the sun is constantly bombarding the Earth's atmosphere with charged particles through what is called the solar wind. The number and velocity of charged particles varies, largely connected to the solar cycle, but are affected by solar weather, notably coronal mass ejections. While these lights are usually confined to the polar regions, the European Space Agency notes that when bombarded with significantly more particles from a coronal mass ejection like the one that occurred September 1st, 1859, auroras can be seen at much lower latitudes, like Memphis, Tennessee, where the Daily Appeal described it as "one of the most brilliant ever witnessed at this latitude and one which will not be probably witnessed in an age or lifetime hereafter," or in Alabama, where the Cahaba Gazette reported that "the light afforded by this Aurora was so great that small objects were distinctly visible at great distances; fine newspaper print could be read in the open air, and many persons mistaking it for daylight arose and commenced their daily avocations before discovering their mistake." The light was so bright that a gentleman who was in New Jersey, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin wrote, states that the general impression was that there was a general conflagration in Philadelphia. Indeed, NASA writes: "Stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii." The Times of London reported: "The whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the sun had set an hour before." The Aurora Australis was every bit as surprising, with exceptional activity noted across Australia, being witnessed much further north than normal in Concepcion, Chile. Space.com explains that for many people around the world, this was the first time they'd ever witnessed the aurora and didn't know what to make of the brighter-than-usual skies. Some believed the end of the world had arrived. The Cincinnati Daily Commercial reported: "The hands of angels shifted the glorious scenery of the heavens."

But that was another effect that was much more disturbing than the aurora, because the same charged particles that were lighting up Nature's chandelier were inducing electrical currents here on Earth. Sciencealert.com explains that the fast-moving charges create an intense magnetic field of their own, inducing another set of electrical currents on the ground far below. Under strong solar activity, those currents can be strong enough to overpower whole electrical grids and destroy sensitive electronics. In the case of the 1859 event, this meant damage to the internet highway of the period—the world's telegraph lines. The Mineral Point, Wisconsin Weekly Tribune wrote: "The electricity which attended this beautiful phenomenon took possession of the magnetic wires throughout the country." There were numerous side displays in the telegraph offices, where all sorts of fantastical and unreadable messages came through the instruments and where the atmospheric fireworks assumed shape and substance in brilliant sparks. The Isle of Wight Observer quoted the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company's lines: "I never, in my experience in 15 years working on telegraph lines, witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis between Quebec and the farthest point last night. So complete were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis that it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night." History.com writes that night telegraph communications around the world began to fail. There were reports of sparks showing from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. In an extraordinary conversation between operators reported in the New York Herald, an operator in Boston told an operator in Portland, Maine, to disconnect the batteries, only to find that the electricity still in the system allowed the telegraphs to continue to operate. The paper reports: "The wires were worked for two hours without the usual batteries—on the auroral current working better, the operator stated, than with the batteries attached."

Carrington visited the observatory at Old Deer Park in Richmond, where a device called a magnetometer, using a compass, recorded disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. The records show that some 18 hours after Carrington had observed the bright light, astronomer journalist Stuart Clark writes in his 2007 book, The Sun King: "Earth began to suffer a sustained assault unequaled in the decades that we had been collecting data." It seems that Carrington's flare had somehow reached out across 93 million miles of void and struck the Earth. It must have been a dizzying and slightly terrifying moment. Carrington's observations of the solar flare, coinciding with the magnetometer records, appearance of the aurora, as an effect on telegraph lines, had a significant effect on the field of astronomy. Clark was quoted in Wired Magazine: "I think that it represents a tipping point in astronomy because, for the first time, astronomers had concrete evidence that a force other than gravity could communicate itself across 93 million miles of space." The extraordinary event became called the Carrington event, and today such major disruptions of the Earth's magnetosphere are called geomagnetic storms.

Aside from startling the world and changing our understanding of the relationship between the Earth and the Sun, the Carrington event then raises a difficult question: How often does such storms occur, and what would happen if the Earth was struck by one as powerful as in 1859? Today, of course, since the time of Carrington, we've learned much and developed much better means of measuring and predicting solar weather. Well, there are several methods of categorizing geomagnetic storms; the one most understandable to the public is the five-point G scale created by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A G1 storm is relatively minor; they trigger weak power grid fluctuations and have some minor impacts on satellite operations, whereas the Carrington event would be a G5, where systems may see widespread voltage control problems, and some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts, and transformers may suffer damage. Pipeline currents could reach hundreds of amps; hi-fi radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, and satellite navigation may be degraded for days as well. But if the skies are clear, a brilliant and intense display of the Northern Lights may reach as far south as Florida and Texas. NOAA explains: In 1859, the telegraph was just about the only communication technology they had. Today, such a storm could severely damage satellites, disable communications by telephone, radio, and TV, and cause electrical blackouts across our whole continent. It could take weeks or longer to fix the damage. Notable is the risk to large electrical transformers, essential to the power grid and yet difficult to replace.

A 2010 National Geographic quoted Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics: "Imagine large cities without power for a week or a month or a year," Baker said. "The losses could be one to two trillion dollars, and the effects could be felt for years." In the same story, Tom Bogdan, the director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, said: "What's at stake are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives." Science Alert notes that a geomagnetic storm in 1989 that was three times smaller than the Carrington event caused the Quebec hydroelectric grid to collapse and damage the grid in New Jersey, causing 5 million people to be without power. A geomagnetic storm in 1972 damaged satellites, caused power outages across the Eastern United States, and apparently caused the explosion of several dozen—some assert as many as 4,000—magnetic influence C mines that the U.S. Navy had deployed off the coast of Vietnam. And that's not terrifying enough. Study of Antarctic ice cores and Japanese cedar trees show a large increase in the isotope carbon-14 in the year 774. Scientists speculate that this might be evidence of a geomagnetic storm called the Miyaki event that, given the size of the increase in carbon-14, Science Alert argues likely dwarfed the G5 Carrington event.

Not all the news is bad. The research suggests that events the size of the Carrington have been relatively rare, not occurring more often than, say, once every 500 years or more. And Dr. Young at NASA notes that the Earth's atmosphere is rather thick, and nothing that we've seen in the last 10,000 years would have been nearly enough to, say, burn through the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. But as to your cell phones, your computers, your electric lights, the Global Positioning System that's used to direct our commercial aircraft, well, the best we can say is that NASA and others have put up a fleet of spacecraft that are designed to monitor solar weather. As NASA explains, more research will prevent another Carrington flare, but it could at least make the flurry of surprise a thing of the past.

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