Every now and then, our star produces immense flares of particles and radiation that can wreak havoc on Earth. For more than 150 years, scientists studying these outbursts and how they affect our planet have placed great focus on a single, seemingly pinnacle example: the Carrington Event of 1859. Here, an eruption from the sun walloped Earth, pumping enough energy into our planet’s magnetic field to set off a massive geomagnetic storm that created beautiful auroral displays but also sparked electrical fires in telegraph lines.
The major worry is that if such an event happened today, it could be devastating to satellites in orbit and infrastructure on the ground. In March 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused a 12-hour blackout in Quebec when it overloaded the entire province’s power grid despite the fact that it was much weaker than even the Carrington Event. Today a geomagnetic storm resulting from a Miyake event would likely see much more widespread effects, including potentially catastrophic power grid and satellite failures.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine, recently calculated that a Carrington Event–level storm today could cause an “Internet apocalypse.” Energetic particles from such a storm could knock out undersea cables between countries, disrupting worldwide Internet traffic for weeks or even months. In the U.S. alone, such a disaster could cost $7 billion per day, Abdu Jyothi estimates.
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