The Carrington Event: Will We Have Another?

The Carrington Event: Will We Have Another?

The world was a very different place in 1859. There were no motorized vehicles, only horse-drawn carriages, trains pulled by coal-fired steam engines, and ships powered by coal-fired turbines. Airplanes were still a pipe dream. As far as electronics went, there weren't any. Ben Franklin's work at Menlo Park didn't begin until 1876, and Nikola Tesla was only three years old in 1859. Long-distance communication happened by telegraph, when it happened at all.

Which is why the Carrington Event caused only a minor stir, and has largely been forgotten by history. But were it to happen again, the results for us would be disastrous.

The Carrington Event was a solar storm more powerful than any other storm in recorded human history. Throughout August and September, sky watchers noticed an astonishingly high rate of sunspots appearing on the face of the sun. The largest flare was observed on September 1 by a British astronomer named Richard Carrington, who recorded the flare for posterity.

Carrington's solar flare propelled a coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth. It was so powerful that it took only 18 hours to arrive, even though coronal mass ejections typically take 3-4 days to travel the distance between the sun and our planet.

This coronal mass ejection caused a magnetic storm that bathed the Earth in electromagnetic radiation. At the time, the dawn of the industrial age, its most obvious effect was to cause the aurora to propagate across the entire planet. Although typically the aurora can only be seen from locations near the poles, the aurora on September 1st and 2nd were seen as far south as the Caribbean.

The secondary effect was to cause the planet's telegraph systems to go completely haywire. Telegraph wires were the only wires being strung in those days, and they conducted the electricity through to the telegraph machines - and even to the telegraph operators, some of whom received powerful shocks. Telegraph machines and poles threw sparks, and some telegraph machines spontaneously caught fire.

Telegraph machines were essentially the only electrical infrastructure on the entire planet in 1859. Imagine what would happen if we were hit by another coronal mass ejection on that scale! In fact a smaller electromagnetic storm hit the Earth in 1989, causing Quebec's power grid to crash.

The effect of another Carrington Event would be similar to that of a global electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Anything electronic would be fried. Increasingly, everything around us is electronic - even our books! This doomsday scenario would resemble what some people were predicting for the millennium - airplanes falling from the sky, every automobile coming to a sudden halt at once, and a global blackout with no hope of restoring temporary power from a generator.

Some people speculate that a Carrington Event may be what the Mayan calendar has predicted for the 2012 apocalypse. Ice core samples show that the Earth is hit with strong coronal mass ejections about every 500 years, which means that some time in the next 300 years we are likely to experience a solar storm (give or take a fudge factor of several hundred years).

Photo credit: Flickr/Guide Gunnar - Arctic Norway