December 2005 saw a small solar storm disrupt satellite to ground communications and GPS navigation signals for 10 minutes. However just under a hundred and fifty years earlier, a much larger solar flare caused much greater influences than a small communications black out.
However, Louis J. Lanzerotti, retired Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and current editor of the journal Space Weather, puts everything in to perspective: "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."
So what would happen if a solar flare like the one that took place at 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859 happened again?
Thirty-three-year-old Richard Carrington was the first man to witness a solar flare, or at least, he was the first scientist to have a vague understanding of what he was seeing. A preeminent astronomer of his day, Carrington was drawing sunspots using his telescope when he saw two brilliant beads of blinding white light appear over his sunspots.
Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled."
Just before dawn the next day however, the energy created by the solar flare, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), struck Earth’s magnetic field, causing the global bubble of magnetism that wraps our planet safely from cosmic rays. The geomagnetic storm that followed sent enormous electric currents surging through telegraph lines, and created auroras so brilliant that the dawn sky turned to midday. So massive was this ejection that auroras were seen all the way over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.
"What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "It's rare that one can actually see the brightening of the solar surface. It takes a lot of energy to heat up the surface of the sun!"
Is another flare like the Carrington one likely to occur in our lifetime? Probably not, seems to be the consensus, as a Carrington-flare is evidenced to be a once every 500-year event. However, Hathaway cautions that we simply don’t know enough to rule out a repeat in our own lifetime.
The damage that could be done should a Carrington-flare occur anytime soon would be catastrophic, with estimates reaching between $30 and $70 billion. With technology so ingrained in our everyday lives, how much more will life be affected than back in a day where the telegraph was the most sophisticated form of communication?
science.nasa.gov
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
