[Music] in August of 1859 astronomers around the world watched with Fascination as the number of sunspots began to grow on the surface of the Sun among those astronomers was Richard Carrington an amateur skywatcher in a small town called Red Hill near London in England on September 1st as Carrington was sketching sunspots he was blinded by a sudden flash of light so bright that he thought a hole had formed in his observation screen and that he was directly observing the sun after adjusting his equipment and finding to his surprise the intense white patches remained he ran
out of his Studio to find a secondary Observer but when he returned the bright spots had already faded what he didn't know at the time was that the explosive energy that he had just witnessed on the surface of the Sun was now rushing towards him and everyone else on Earth what Carrington had seen was a major coronal mass ejection a burst of magnetized plasma from the sun's upper atmosphere the corona it usually takes multiple days for a coronal mass ejection to reach Earth but just 17 and a half hours later the ejected plasma had traversed
over 90 million miles 150 million kilometers between the Sun and the Earth and began to unleash an unprecedented geomagnetic storm auroras otherwise known as the northern lights were seen as far south as the Caribbean the Aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke up gold miners that were there who began preparing breakfast because they thought that it was morning electrical systems all over Europe and North America began to fail and Telegraph pylons through Sparks and in some cases electrocuted their operators spontaneous fires were reported in several major
cities some Telegraph operators even found that they were able to continue to send and receive messages after they disconnected the power supplies from their Telegraph machines with the telegraph lines instead powered solely by the overhead Aurora this geomagnetic storm was the worst in modern history and it became known as the Carrington event the energy ejected from the Sun was estimated to be equivalent to 10 billion megatons of exploding TNT imagine the infamous SAR bomb the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated and you're about five billionths of the way there it's been conjectured that a storm
on the scale of the Carrington event if it did happen today could cause an internet apocalypse inducing extreme voltages in the electrical wiring and threatening the stability of the electrical grid even including the possibility of destroying undersea cables that carry much of the world's internet traffic in the past few weeks the internet has been buzzing with the fear that this event May reoccur in the next 18 months as we enter a peak period of sun activity in 2025. every 11 years or so the sun's magnetic field completely reverses a cycle can be as short as
eight years or as long as 14 years and varies dramatically in intensity as the magnetic field lines change so does the amount of activity on the sun's surface including things like solar flares sunspots and coronal mass ejections these explosive coronal mass ejections generally begin when highly Twisted magnetic field structures otherwise known as flux ropes contained in the sun's lower Corona becomes so stressed that they realign spontaneously into a less tense configuration a process called magnetic reconnection this can result in the sudden release of electromagnetic energy in the form of things like solar flares which are
typically accompanied by the explosive acceleration of plasma away from the Sun the coronal mass ejection these types of coronal mass ejections usually take place from areas of the sun with localized fields of strong and stress magnetic flux such as active regions associated with sunspots during a solar maximum sunspots are typically found along the mid latitudes approximately 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south the largest coronal mass ejections can contain billions of tons of solar material and burst out from the Sun at up to 3 000 kilometers per second they expand in size as they propagate
away from the sun and the largest coronal mass ejections can reach a size comprising nearly a quarter of the space between Earth and the Sun by the time they actually reach our planet if they do strike Earth they play Havoc with Earth's magnetic field but could they really Wipe Out the internet to answer that question we have to understand a little bit deeper as to what's happening a solar storm provides a large-scale demonstration of something called Faraday's law the idea that varying a magnetic field will cause a change in the local electric field as the
charge plasma of the solar storm approaches the Earth Earth's magnetic field is distorted and weakened most electrical systems are connected or grounded to the Earth in some way usually to give a path of least resistance in case of electrical failure for the current to flow when the geoelectric field of the Earth changes this can enter electrical systems through those grounding points and induce large voltages short-circuiting or destroying entirely those Electronics most large electrical infrastructure systems have ways of dealing with these sorts of events when they are of normal magnitudes however failures still happen on March
13 1989 a solar storm caused the entire province of Quebec Canada to suffer a nine hour long electrical power blackout as the storm overwhelmed Hydro Quebec's electricity transmission system the infrastructure however that is most difficult to repair would be those undersea cables that connect most of our internet across the world typically these cables are Optical fibers carrying information as light and as a result are made out of glass not copper so solar storms in theory shouldn't affect Optical fibers ability to carry information however these undersea cables also contain a copper electrical line to power the
periodically placed repeaters that boost the power of those light signals in the optical fibers these electronic systems can be affected by recording past periods of solar activity and measuring the voltage effect on these undersea cables a research team at Google produced a plot of the voltage effects solar activity has on these undersea cables the March 1989 storm that white wiped out the Quebec electrical grid fill here and estimations of a Carrington light event also fall just below the available voltage Headroom before damaging these systems now this might start to make you feel reasonably safe however
other research tells a different story looking for signatures of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections in carbon 14 tree rings and beryllium 10 ice cores the signature from a large solar storm was found about a thousand years ago that was estimated to be about 20 times the usual activity of the Sun or about 10 times the size of the Carrington event well beyond the limit of any deep sea cable to withstand estimates vary from once per 100 years for a Carrington level event to once per Millennia for ones that are much more powerful and
unfortunately we're overdue for both however solar cycle 25 looks like the last four solar Cycles before it reasonably tame in the grand scheme of solar activity if I was a betting man I'd say probably not something to lose sleepover for this solar cycle at least but then again the past decade has had a good handful of once in a lifetime events so what's one more [Music]
