Why A Carrington Event Would Be Worse Today Than In 1859

In the early morning on September 1st, 1859, Richard Carrington climbed into the private observatory at his country estate outside of London. After cranking open the domes shutters to see a clear blue sky, Carrington pointed his telescope toward the sun and began to sketch a cluster of magnificent-sized dark spots freckling the surface. Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light.” Those patches appeared to erupt from the sunspots.

Five minutes after those eruptions, the fireballs disappeared. Hours later, the whole planet felt the effect.

On the night of September 1st, 1859, telegraph communications were failing worldwide. Reports of sparks shooting from the machines, shocking operators, came from all over the planet. The earth saw colorful auroras illuminate the skies at night, glowing so brightly that the birds began to chirp, and people that confusingly thought it was daytime began their morning chores.

While some thought it was the end of days, what Carrington had seen was the cause for the bizarre occurrences. There was a massive solar flare with the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs.

The solar flare caused electrified gas and subatomic particles to shoot toward the planet, resulting in a massive geomagnetic storm. Named for the astronomer that discovered the first event, the Carrington Event was the largest recorded solar storm.

In July of 2012, a massive CME erupted from the sun. While there is sufficient coverage of asteroids big enough to send modern civilization into the stone age, nothing was announced, and news agencies paid near zero attention to the event.

“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces.”

— Daniel Baker, University Of Colorado 2014

Baker and colleagues from NASA and several universities published a study of the storm in December 2013 that was released in the Journal of Space Weather. The study titled, “A Major Solar Eruptive Event In July 2012," described a coronal mass ejection tearing through the Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012. But fortunately, Earth wasn’t there.

“If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.”

— Daniel Baker

Expert Beliefs In The Effect Of Another Carrington Event

The threat of Extreme solar storms is direct to all the forms of higher technology. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of the atmosphere. This creates a “Solar EMP” that would cause radio blackouts, GPS failures, satellite system failures, and more. Minutes to hours later energetic particles arrive. The effect on the electric grids, power, and communications lines, and everything plugged into a wall socket, is catastrophic.

Widespread power blackouts that would take weeks into months to repair may not be the end of the problems. With everything that we depend on as a race of people, many wouldn’t be able to even flush their toilets as most urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps and water treatment stations.

In February of 2014, physicist Pete Riley published a paper in Space Weather. In it, he analyzed solar storms going back more than 50 years and calculated the odds of a Carrington-Class storm hitting the Earth in the next ten years. If his findings were correct, there was only a 12% chance of it happening before 2025.

If It Happened Today

What to be prepared for in the case of another Carrington Event is debatable but if the experts are to be believed, and using the lessons from the first event, we can surmise how bad things will get.

• Gridlock would become a problem as the digital and electronics age controls most gas pumps around the country and throughout the world.
• Cell phone service would be down indefinitely. Things higher up are going to be fried the worst, and cell towers are going to be hit hard during a massive solar event.
• Computers will be fried. Emails, the internet, and all that lovely porn that people enjoy so much will be rendered a thing of the past during the recovery from the massive solar events.
• Modern-day plumbing would go down due to the requirement of electric pumping and water treatment stations.
• Manufacturing would come to a screeching halt.
• Candlelight would become the predominant form of lighting our homes as batteries run out.
• Airflight would be minimal due to electronics and fuel supply issues.
• When power grids go down and fuel supplies are depleted life support systems would be rendered unusable.

How would you respond? The way we respond to such an event would mean as much as the event itself. Would there be chaos and looting? Or, would we be unusually sane and come together as a species in sight of the greater good? What do you think?

What To Do To Prepare

Only science and industry are capable of making the advancements to our technology to prepare us for massive catastrophic events. While some question the need for agencies like NASA, NASA and its sister agencies are the ones that will work with developers to protect life as we know it and defend the human race from such natural disasters.

People can spend their lives preparing for such events and never see them, wasting life on worry. Or, they can be prepared to deal with events as they occur.

Conclusion

Knowing it could happen is one thing. Worrying about it another. The world survived for thousands of years without power and will no doubt continue to go on even in the event of another Carrington Event. Stock up on books, have some candles, and maybe a surplus of batteries and bottled water. After that, we may have to go old school and live like mountain men for a while but with 6 or 7 trillion dollars the United States would get back to normal.

References:

History.com

NASA.com

Space Weather

Journal Of Space Science