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In early September 1859, our planet was hit by the mother of all solar storms. Days of intense activity on the surface of our sun culminated in a gigantic cloud of highly charged particles being spewed towards us at phenomenal speed. Telegraph systems failed across Europe and North America; some shot out so many sparks they started fires in the skies. The aurora borealis swept so far south that the northern lights were visible in Cuba. Known today as the Carrington Event, it remains the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded.
Yet, while the storm's effects were impressive in 1859, it's in the here and now that we really have to worry about them. In the century and a half since, our world has gone from one that could be disrupted by another Carrington Event to one that would be absolutely devastated by it. And the scariest part: such a storm is almost certain to strike within our lifetimes. Today, Geographics is investigating both the historical Carrington Event and what might happen when its unwanted sequel finally arrives.
Lying 150 million kilometers from the Earth, our sun is a cosmic miracle. It's thanks to the endless reactions taking place within it that our world as we know it exists—that complex life, consciousness, and particular YouTube hosts ever came into being. But while the good stuff the sun does certainly outweighs the bad, that doesn't mean our local star doesn't occasionally act like a total dick. The biggest of all its dick moves? That'd be solar storms, also known as geomagnetic storms.
Solar storms are the hurricanes of space, blowing through our immediate planetary neighborhood in semi-regular seasons. And just like real hurricanes, they can seriously screw stuff up. Before we get to all that juicy apocalyptic stuff, though, we need to try and get our heads around why solar storms happen. The reason lies in the makeup of the sun itself. A gigantic ball of electrified hydrogen, the sun is constantly churning away, generating vast amounts of magnetic energy. Every now and then, a whole lot of this energy gets released. Sometimes this happens in a blinding flash—what we call a solar flare. Other times it happens when a ton of material and energy is hurled out all at once in a coronal mass ejection, or CME. It's these CMEs that we call solar storms, and they happen on every part of the sun's surface, spewing out in all directions like a queasy kid projectile vomiting off the merry-go-round. Because of this, most of them go blasting harmlessly off into space. Every now and then, though, one comes crashing right into Earth.
The full effects of these solar storms take days to be felt, hitting in stages, each worse than the last. First, you get a load of high-energy rays hitting the atmosphere with enough power to knock out radio communication and mess up GPS systems. Next comes the radiation storm, which can both harm astronauts and fry the electronics inside satellites. Finally, the CME hits. Described by NASA as "billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma," coronal mass ejections can take days to reach the Earth. When they finally hit our planet's magnetic field, they send everything haywire, triggering massive electromagnetic fluctuations. It's these fluctuations that give us one of the main ways for measuring the intensity of solar storms: Disturbance Storm Time, or Dst, for short.
At the risk of oversimplifying, Dst basically calculates how wildly our magnetic field wobbles in a storm. The further into the minuses the number, the more powerful the storm. So a mild storm that causes the northern lights to go bright and trippy might have a Dst of only -50 nT (nT meaning nanoTesla). And yes, we totally agree that that's way too many new acronyms for a single chapter. Blame all those number-loving scientists for that one. Anyway, further up the scale, you might get something like the Quebec Blackout storm, which was so powerful it knocked out Quebec's entire grid in 1989. That registered as a Dst of -600. The Carrington Event, by contrast, today is estimated to have reached up to a staggering -1750 nT. In other words, it was the solar storm of the century. Now, Dst has only been measured since 1957, so getting an accurate fix on something that happened in 1859 involves a whole lot of guesswork. But, as we're about to see, the Carrington Event didn't need to be quantified for Victorian folk to know that it was special. When it hit, it would cause confusion and chaos across most of the world.
The morning of September 1st, 1859, began like any other for Richard Carrington, an amateur English astronomer. Carrington was in the habit of whiling away the day in his private observatory, studying the sun through a special brass telescope and noting what he saw. But as he opened the observatory's shutter that painful morning, Carrington could never have guessed that he was about to witness something very out of the ordinary. Millions of kilometers away, events were already taking place that would ensure his name went down in history. Four days earlier, on August 28th, our star had entered a period of frenzied activity. Sunspots had appeared on the surface, swarming and multiplying—dark, cool patches, relatively speaking, that writhed in the heat. Shortly after they first appeared, at least one solar flare had erupted, sending charged particles flying through the voyage toward Earth. That evening had seen the very first evidence of a CME impact in the northern hemisphere: aurora had glowed stronger than usual, shimmering in the skies of New England, in Pittsburgh, and Washington D.C. Telegraph machines had overheated, with one operator—a dude otherwise completely forgotten to history called Frederick W. Royce—getting a severe electric shock. But while this was great for both fans of the northern lights and enemies of telegraph operators named Frederick, it wasn't the sort of event that would make history. No, that was due to happen the bright morning of September 1st.
As Carrington sat below the blue sky, squinting into his telescope once again, sunspots were clustering on the sun's surface. Sunspots Carrington was determined to draw as accurately as possible. He was still sketching around noon when it suddenly happened: in rapid succession, two fireballs exploded from the sunspots, brilliant in their intensity. Today we know these were solar flares, each unleashing hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the entire nuclear stockpile detonating at once. For Carrington in 1859, though, they were a tantalizing mystery. Up to this point, no one had ever directly observed a solar flare before. Carrington and another astronomer who was independently monitoring the sun—a guy named Hodgson—had just made history. But neither could have guessed that the exciting stuff was just beginning. As those solar flares erupted, they hurled a massive CME out into space. With 150 million kilometers separating Earth from the sun, it usually takes CMEs multiple days to reach us, but the one Carrington saw being born was different. We know today it crossed the gulf of space in just 17 hours—much faster than usual. It's now thought that CMEs are capable of clearing paths for one another through the interplanetary medium—sort of how it's easier for you to pick your way through the undergrowth if some overweight dude has already gone crashing through, flattening everything. In 1859, though, nobody knew about such things. No one knew that the earlier solar flares on August 28th had opened a superhighway for the CME to go barreling along. When it came crashing into Earth that same night, no one was going to be spared from the aftermath.
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For millions of people, the first and second of September 1859 would go down in memory as two days of unfathomable weirdness in the sky. Intensely bright auroras stretched from horizon to horizon, shining and shimmering at latitudes that had never seen the northern lights before. In South Carolina, the sky turned a brilliant blood red that reflected in the waters off the coast and made the world seem like it was on fire. As one eyewitness on Sullivan's Island later wrote, "The shells on the beach reflecting light resembled coals of fire." Nor was it just South Carolina. Over in Colorado, a gang of miners mistook the burning sky for daybreak and began work in the middle of the night. Up in Boston, the light was so bright that people were able to read the newspaper by it well after sundown. We can only hope Principal Skinner's look-alike ancestor was preparing steamed hams, unable to believe the aurora borealis was in this part of the country at this time of year and visible from his kitchen. But it wasn't all just pretty space lights and odd meme references. In countries across the world, people mistook the orange horizon for fires consuming neighborhood towns and they rushed to help; in some cases, they were even right. The gigantic CME that was the Carrington Event blew out telegraphs across the western world. Some of these really blew, sending out showers of sparks that set fire to paper and burned down entire offices. In other cases, lines that exploded in populated areas set fire to homes. Mostly, though, that night simply consisted of people staring at the sky and wondering if the end of the world had come. The area aurora extended as far south as Colombia, a country that lies partially on the equator. It illuminated the skies in Cuba, Jamaica, and southern China. In the southern hemisphere, aurora australis were reported as far north as Queensland. Of course, not everyone found this once-in-a-lifetime display a thing of wonder. One railroad conductor in Bealeton, Virginia, got so pissed off at the songbirds wobbling away like it was morning that he went outside and shot a bunch of them—proof that in the face of any event of any magnitude, there will always be at least one American somewhere waving a gun.
By the time the morning of September 2nd dawned, it was clear the event had caused a major disruption. Telegraph lines across the USA had been fried, and those that were still intact were unable to transmit or receive information. Thankfully for Victorian dudes, the telegraph was still a relatively new technology in 1859; its explosive growth wouldn't take place until the next decade, which meant every telegraph in the U.S. getting fried was more of an annoyance than a catastrophe—sort of like how the entire internet going down in 1995 would have been crappy, but the same thing happening in 2007 would have been a disaster. It took several hours to restore communications and several weeks more to fix all of the fire damage to telegraph stations. Yet that day wasn't all bad news, especially for science. A magnetometer reading of the CME hitting the Earth triggered a brainwave in Richard Carrington, who became the first person to theorize a link between solar activity and aurora in our skies. It's thanks to this that the massive solar storm of 1859 would be named after him.
So that's the Carrington Event—a crazy night of light shows and disruptive communication over a century and a half ago. But that story and this video don't stop here, because the Carrington Event wasn't a one-off. In the 16-odd decades since, we've seen other solar storms that were nearly as powerful, and that leads us to a terrifying question: Could it happen again? [Music]
Just how scary you find the Carrington Event depends largely on who you talk to. That's because a whole lot of people have a whole lot of wholly different opinions on how often such powerful solar storms happen. One source we read claimed it was so rare that we might not be due for another Carrington storm for another thousand years. On the other hand, a whole bunch of sources placed the timescale more like every 150 years. Given that 1859 is conspicuously more than 150 years ago, that's a bit of a worrying thought. But perhaps the most worrying of all was a recent paper from astrophysicist Hisashi Hayakawa at Osaka University. By studying old data from across the globe, he claimed to find that Carrington-size events happen every few decades. That would mean we're not just due another apocalyptic solar storm hitting Earth, but we're severely overdue. And you might be beginning to see why this is a bit scary. Hayakawa's argument rests on previous storms being as powerful as the 1859 one but simply less observed. For example, in 1770, records from Japan and China show bright red aurora at some of the lowest latitudes ever recorded, with the southern lights in turn coming up so high that Captain Cook was able to sketch them around Timor Island. But because no one had yet invented electronic equipment that could be disrupted, witnesses were more like, "Oh, that's pretty," rather than, "Whoa, the sun is trying to kill us!"
Then there's the New York Railroad storm, taking place in the spring of 1921. It hit at a time when equipment did exist that could get fried, and fry it did. That solar storm caused a fire that engulfed a New York City control tower and two other major fires in Canada and Sweden and knocked out telephone lines across Europe, New Zealand, Japan, and Brazil. Today, most scientists think the New York Railroad storm was smaller than the Carrington Event—a strong gale compared to 1859's Category 5 hurricane—but Hayakawa thinks it should be seen as equally strong. Nor is it the only solar storm of the last century that caused problems. There was the 1972 storm that caused sea mines to spontaneously detonate at the height of the Vietnam War; the 1989 event that knocked out the entire Quebec grid; in 2003, the Halloween storm caused blackouts across Sweden. While each of these storms was far less powerful than the Carrington Event, they were all still disruptive. But the scariest of all came in a year once widely associated with the apocalypse: 2012. Remember all the hype that the world was going to end based on old Mayan calendars? Well, it turned out it kind of almost did. That July, a gigantic CME swept through Earth's orbit—one so powerful its Dst would have registered -1200 nT, just a hair under the Carrington Event. Luckily, the Earth wasn't there when the 2012 CME hit; the storm missed us by a week—the planetary equivalent of a runaway truck whizzing through the place where a pedestrian was stood just seconds earlier. Had that CME caught us in its embrace, 2012 would be remembered today not for the London Olympics and the electoral snoozefest between Obama and Romney, but as the year the digital world collapsed.
This is why the frequency of Carrington-class storms is important. If they're rarer than 2012's near-miss, presumably, that means we're safe for another century and a half. But if Hayakawa is on the money, then it may only be a few more decades before one that size hits us for real. All of which means it's time to finally get to the really juicy part: What would happen if another Carrington Event storm struck today? [Music]
Compared to the devastation a supervolcano or mega-earthquake would unleash, a second Carrington Event can seem almost anticlimactic. Instead of reaching the tens or hundreds of thousands, deaths would be down in the lower end of the scale, even if you included as many indirect deaths as possible. No cities would be reduced to smoldering rubble; no landscapes would be devastated. The physical world after the CME would look more or less the same. But make no mistake: another giant solar storm would cause intense damage—damage that might take years to clean up. In that time, your life would change completely.
From a personal perspective, the first thing you'd probably notice when Carrington's unwanted sequel struck would be the power going out. This is especially true if you live in the eastern United States, and especially, especially true if you live in New England, where the power grid is super interconnected, meaning failures can easily cascade. The moment the solar storm hit, it would blow out giant transformers by the hundreds—something of a major problem, as giant transformers can take months to replace. It's here that we see how things might get dangerous. If the solar storm struck in the depths of winter, the entire grid going down long-term across the eastern seaboard wouldn't just be an inconvenience; it'd be a humanitarian disaster. Remember the Texas blackout in February 2021 that was accompanied by freezing temperatures? That grid failure killed anywhere between 111 and 200 people—a number brutally exacerbated by the lack of heating and power in people's homes. Now apply that to the entire Northeast region during a cold winter, and it's easy to see how deaths could spiral. Still, there's nothing to say a Carrington storm would hit in winter or in summer, when knocking out cooling systems in the South might also lead to excess deaths. Let's say it hits around springtime during a mild year, when extreme weather is the least of your worries. What might you experience? The biggest thing would be the sudden lack of connectedness. While you've probably lost your Wi-Fi in a blackout before and been super annoyed at your lack of access to videos narrated by knowledgeable bald men, this would be a whole other level. Not only would the internet be down everywhere, but so would GPS systems, satellite communications, radios, and most television signals. Nor would it be just communication networks that were knocked out; most cities today use electric pumps for supplying water—pumps that would be rendered useless when the entire grid blew. That means you'd suddenly be stuck without water or a flushing toilet for God knows how long. But shops are still standing; vehicles still work. You could just go buy more water, right? Well, probably not. If you normally pay with stuff using a card or by using your phone, that would now be impossible since electronic payment systems would be offline. Even ATMs, which rely on an internet or satellite link for verifying your information, would be rendered unusable. In other words, you'd suddenly be stuck without communications in a place without power, with no easy access to water or money, and no way of telling people where you were or of getting information. And you would be just one of millions upon millions of people across the globe in exactly the same situation. It would be the sort of crisis we normally only see in the aftermath of disasters like storms and earthquakes, only this time it might be affecting half the United States.
For anyone caught up in such an event, the disruption would be beyond imagination. In a worst-case scenario, you might have multiple major cities without power for weeks or months. In some areas, it's been estimated that completely restoring power might take up to a year. And that's just America, with similar catastrophes unfolding across every continent, hitting some of the world's biggest population centers. It's easy to imagine the hit the global economy might take. In the aftermath of the 2012 near-miss, Lloyd's of London tried to estimate the cost of a modern Carrington Event; they calculated damages of up to 2.62 trillion dollars in the United States alone. Thankfully, though, that's just a worst-case scenario. Unlike a stray extinction-causing asteroid, another Carrington Event would have little chance of hitting without warning. In recent years, agencies like NASA have sent satellites up specifically for monitoring space weather—satellites that could relay to us when a gigantic solar storm was on its way. This means we should have anywhere from several hours to a few days to prepare for disaster. Power grids and transformers could be shut down to prevent overloading; satellites could be taken offline; long-distance flights could be grounded. It would be the global equivalent of fastening the storm shutters, locking up the house, and retreating into the basement to ride out a hurricane. The disruption would be major; the hit to the economy significant. But, well, if nothing else, it couldn't be worse than 2020. The reality of another Carrington Event, then, is unlikely to result in large-scale destruction. Massive inconvenience? Yep. Satellites and telecoms and other infrastructure being knocked offline? Certainly. Economic damage? God yes. But the end of the world as we...
Know it well; that depends. So long as our leaders are willing to listen to scientists, we should be okay. So long as we don't have populists in office who will keep the grid online through the storm just to please the idiots on Twitter, but we should get through it relatively unscathed. I really need to hope that's the case, because the alternative is a technological disaster.
It's also a disaster that could come sooner than you think. Solar storms normally take place during something known as the solar maximum, a period every 11-odd years when our star gets all energetic and the time is ripe for CMEs and solar flares. The next maximum is due around 2023. If it leads to another Carrington level storm, or even just a Quebec blackout-size event, we'll be able to see how prepared our planet really is.
Because if there's one thing you take from this video, it's that another gigantic solar storm striking our planet is inevitable. We just hope that when it finally arrives, we're ready for it. So I really hope you found this video interesting. If you did, please do hit that thumbs up button below. Don't forget to subscribe and, as always, thank you for watching. You.