If a solar storm as big as the Carrington Event struck today, it could lead to years long power outages.
In 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington saw a blast of white light on the surface of the sun. This was the Carrington Event, as scientists now call it, and it is the largest recorded solar storm ever recorded. It was linked with extraordinary auroras — the Northern and Southern Lights — that were visible in the sky near both the poles and the equator, everywhere from Canada to Australia.The enormous solar outburst also caused electrical disruptions from Paris to Boston.
"Luminous waves rolled up in quick succession as far as the zenith, some a brilliancy sufficient to cast a perceptible shadow on the ground," the Times of London reported on Sept. 6, 1859 . Meanwhile, telegraph lines experienced"one of the most startling as well as singular electrical phenomena," when"a superabundance of electricity in the air" enabled telegraph machines to send messages from New York to Pittsburgh without the aid of batteries, according to the Washington Star in 1859 .
Solar flares are often accompanied by the release of giant bubbles of solar material, known as coronal mass ejections . These eruptions may contain billions of tons of plasma — clouds of electrically charged particles — that can race out at millions of miles per hour, NASA noted . Geomagnetic storms can also disrupt radio communications and GPS navigation by warping the atmosphere in ways that modify the paths of radio signals, NOAA noted. For instance, the Halloween Storm of 2003 prevented the Federal Aviation Administration from providing GPS navigational guidance for roughly 30 hours, according to a 2011 study for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security .
Similarly, a 2017 study in the journal Space Weather found that in the most extreme blackout scenario, impacting 66% of the U.S. population, the daily domestic economic loss could total $41.5 billion plus an additional $7 billion loss via international supply chain disruptions. In contrast, if it only affected extreme northern states, which are home to 8% of the U.S. population, the economic loss per day could reach $6.2 billion supplemented by an international supply chain loss of $0.8 billion.
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