NewsJuly 25, 2014

This Would be the Ultimate 'Sunburn' for Your Summer

By Andrea Thompson

Follow @AndreaTWeather

As you head into another summer weekend and your thoughts turn toward beach trips and barbecues, we thought we’d share with you a little light (no pun intended) reading about our ultimate power source, the sun, and the chance it could unleash a huge storm that could cause major damage to systems that modern life depends on. We’ll start with a little history:

A coronal mass ejection (or CME) erupts from the sun on Dec. 2, 2002.
Credit: NASA

Image

On Sept. 1, 1859, noted English solar astronomer Richard Carrington watched through a telescope as a large set of sunspots on the solar surface erupted in a white, blinding light that grew and then faded over the course of just five minutes.

He didn’t know it at the time, but what Carrington had witnessed was a massive solar flare — and not just any solar flare, the strongest solar flare on record. The plume of charged particles and magnetic loops that accompanied the flare, called a coronal mass ejection (or CME), rocketed straight at the Earth, causing spectacular aurora displays that reached all the way down to Cuba and creating geomagnetic storms that wreaked havoc on one of the main technologies of the day, the telegraph system.

It’s this later effect that is the big worry in today’s electricity-dependent world. Over at Extreme Tech, Sebastian Anthony discusses a recent CME that was likely as strong as the so-called Carrington Event and the probability that a commensurate storm could hit the Earth in the next decade, which one physicist calculated to be 12 percent.RELATEDNew Satellite to Improve Climate and Weather Forecasts
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A CME erupted from the sun in July 2012, caught in the act by NASA’s sun-watching probes, but fortunately it was aimed away from Earth. If it had hit the planet, it could have damaged satellites, disrupted GPS signals and overloaded power transformers, causing blackouts. (The only large solar storm in modern times did cause a blackout in Quebec in 1989.)

While the resulting effects of a Carrington Event today probably wouldn’t knock us back to the Stone Age, as Anthony says, it would cause damage that could take years to fully recover from, prompting experts to advocate for improving things like electrical grids to make them more resilient.

Unfortunately, CMEs aren’t well understood and can’t really be predicted (though scientists can generally tell when a solar flare is developing), which leaves us even more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the sun’s activity.

At least, as Anthony points out, we’d have some seriously rad auroras to look at while our TVs and smartphones are rendered useless.

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