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Morning Open Thread. The Carrington Event of 1859. There will be another. [1]

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Date: 2022-07-30

“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” --Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

You see that benign, near-Mona Lisa smile in our MOT sun motif? Imagine that face as malevolent and with sinister visage instead, something like this,

and you’ll get a feeling of what “evil” may come under (from) our sun during a coronal mass ejection.

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug. Grab your supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, then Hail and Well Met, new Friend.

As MOT readers know of me, I’m a science guy. I watch a lot of science documentaries and enjoy talking about them. The Sun, Inferno in the Sky (available on CuriosityStream), is one of those, and it features the Carrington Event, a coronal mass ejection, that caused havoc even back then, setting telegraph wires and offices on fire. If there had been sun telescopes back then like we have today, it would have looked something like this, only bigger. And without the cool music.

So, just what was the Carrington Event and what is a coronal mass ejection?

The Carrington Event was a large solar storm that took place at the beginning of September 1859, just a few months before the solar maximum of 1860. In August 1859, astronomers around the world watched with fascination as the number of sunspots on the solar disk grew. Among them was Richard Carrington, an amateur skywatcher in a small town called Redhill, near London in England. On Sep. 1, as Carrington was sketching the sunspots, he was blinded by a sudden flash of light. Carrington described it as a "white light flare" according to NASA spaceflight (opens in new tab). The whole event lasted about five minutes. The flare was a major coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of magnetized plasma from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona. In 17.6 hours, the CME traversed over 90 million miles (150 million km) between the sun and Earth and unleashed its force on our planet. According to NASA spaceflight, it usually takes CMEs multiple days to reach Earth. … The Carrington Event sparked a huge geomagnetic storm that wreaked havoc with technology. Earth fell silent as telegraph communications around the world failed. According to History.com (opens in new tab), there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, operators receiving electric shocks and papers set ablaze by the rogue sparks. source: www.space.com

Should we worry about another CME like the Carrington happening again? Oh boy howdy, yeah we should. Well, not worry so much, as instead be prepared for it.

While solar storms rarely pose a direct threat to human life, there’s a risk they can impact safety-critical systems via electromagnetic effects — from space-based communications, navigation and weather forecasting services to electrical power distribution at ground level, according to ESA's Space Weather Service Network (opens in new tab) It’s been conjectured that a storm on the scale of the Carrington event, if it happened today, could cause an internet apocalypse, sending large numbers of people and businesses offline. For this reason, the U.K. government (opens in new tab) lists adverse space weather as one of the most serious natural hazards in its National Risk Register, and companies have contingency plans to deal with severe events — as long as they have sufficient warning of them. Researchers from Lloyd's of London and the Atmospheric and Environmental Research agency in the U.S. have estimated that a Carrington-class event today would result in between $0.6 and $2.6 trillion in damages to the U.S. alone, according to NASA spaceflight.

Here’s about the best video I could find on YouTube about the Carrington Event. None of the others were any shorter (well, it was a big deal) and the few I did start to watch were too sponsor-heavy, i.e. commercials. The narrator isn’t exactly scintillating, but it is straight-up factual. Ignore the “horror” part.

This is the worst we’ve experienced in our own time:

This was just a “little” one. Only nine hours of blackout. From what I’ve read, a Carrington Event happening today could leave us without electrical services, telecommunications (that’s right: no cell phones, no internet, no GPS, and maybe not even land line telephone), and even without water and food supplies for several weeks or even months. So, how to prepare for an apocalyptic event like that?

Well, truth is we can’t, not entirely. I think we’d recover, eventually, but it would be atrocious in the meantime. Otherwise, best you can do is to be prepared just like you should be for any natural disaster. Have a stock of non-perishable food on hand, a few hundred or thousands of gallons of water, a spare room full of batteries, and keep those bicycles in well-oiled condition. For that matter, a barn full of horses couldn’t hurt. And practice your semaphore. You could be in high demand.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/30/2109320/-Morning-Open-Thread-The-Carrington-Event-of-1859-There-will-be-another

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