The 1859 Carrington Event

On that morning, as he sketched an unusual cluster of sunspots, the area erupted in a bright flash as an unfathomable amount of energy stored in the twisted ropes of the Sun’s magnetic field was released, propelling billions of tons of star-stuff on a collision course with Earth.Carrington had witnessed a solar flare, and the consequent coronal mass ejection that would hit Earth just 17 hours later would result in a geomagnetic storm of such strength that it would be worldwide news the next day, and would bear his name into the future. Some solar observatories even had magnetometers that could record changes on Earth and correlate them to solar activity.The event that Carrington was lucky enough to have watched unfold on September 1 was only one of many outbursts that the Sun would have over a multi-day period. That suggests that one or more of the sunspots had created a solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME) of sufficient energy to fling a cloud of plasma toward Earth sometime in the prior two days — while the electromagnetic effects of a solar flare are visible about 8 minutes after it happens, the matter subsequently ejected takes several days to push through the 93 million miles (150 million km) of space between the Sun and the Earth.Carrington’s observations of the sunspots seen on Sept. That the first effects of the arriving CME were reported a mere 18 hours after Carrington saw the flare suggests that the previous solar flares had cleared the space between Earth and the Sun to make the plasma cloud travel faster than the usual million miles (1.6 million km) per hour; or perhaps the CME that arrived the night of September 2nd was in fact released by an earlier, unobserved solar flare.No matter the source, the arriving beast caused a geomagnetic storm of epic proportions. By the time the storm was over, millions of dollars in damage had been inflicted upon the fledgling network.In the century and a half since Richard Carrington made his observation, solar scientists have studied the Carrington Event and searched ice-core and other records for evidence of similar storms hitting Earth. One, a “Carrington class” CME launched by a 2012 solar flare, missed intersecting with Earth in its orbit by a mere nine days.Famed insurer Lloyd’s of London, a firm with much to lose in such an event, commissioned a study to estimate the impact of a Carrington-level event striking the Earth today. The after effects would need need to last at least 4 hours to take out all the LEO (low earth orbit) satellites and probably 12 hours to take out all the geostationary satellites.Could the human race survive if 70% of our satellites are fried and 95% of everything that uses electricity on one one side of the planet is dead.What was it Ming the Merciless said something like “They’ll survive but be satisfied with less.”In many ways the 1989 flare and CME that knocked out part of Canada was more powerful than the carrington flare. The timescale of the rate of change in the Earth’s magnetosphere is too long even in intense events to generate voltages large enough across transistor junctions or circuit bits to damage them. There has been a campaign since the early 2000s to install fast ground fault interruption circuits on these backbone transformers as part of a national security initiative but it never got the funding bill inclusion it needed to do it widespread (in the USA).So anything long and continuous like telephone, power, liquid pipes, etc could have damaging currents induced.Huh, I never thought about water pipes having these currents induced in them. But then again I was surprised that solar events can be large enough to collapse earth’s magnetic fields. I guess major infrastructures will hold except for the power transformers at end of hundred and thousand kilometers long power lines not equiped with fast ground fault breaker.I work at a telecom company…the fibre optic wires themselves may be immune, but every major fibre trunk cable will have some form of copper “finder wire” so they can locate it when digging, or if there’s a break between repeaters.And with fibre optics – those distances between repeaters is measured in tens to hundreds of kilometers so that finder wire could very well get an induced current.They also have some form of metallic shielding built into them, mostly for protection against digging. By long we’re talking like, a kilometer or more.Looking again at Carrington’s drawing of the event, I wonder if any of our “local” solar observation satellites would survive such an event. Just add car battery (or a few, since 48VDC is also relatively common).I recommend the book “The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.” Knowing this story opens ones eyes to the power of convention in science and how it can affect conclusions.To people that think that global catasthrophy can never happen, this is related reading regarding relatively recent volcanic event:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_SummerWow. We should dig into that one.The onehundret and sixty year old source drawing is an inspiration to me.That seems like a long time, but to my dad it is only 65 years old.Harvard’s Earth Shield CAN REPEL space threats and AVERT the RISING BLACKOUTS (as 2017’s’ in 15 US cities) & all nuclear plants’ explosion by the next solar superstorm, as we thankfully escaped in July 2012* https://astronomy.fas.harvard.edu/news/impact-and-mitigation-strategy-future-solar-flares *http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm – http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/final_shibata_SWW_2015.pdf