Solar Storm Danger

Scientists are warning that the 1859 solar storm – to date the largest ever known and dubbed the Carrington event –  British astronomer Richard Carrington having observed a massive solar eruption that reached earth in just 17 hours, so powerful that the aurora borealis could be seen as far south as the Caribbean – could well be a minor event compared to the next possible occurrence.

They anticipate that, as solar activity heads toward a 10-year peak by 2014, satellites, power grids and communications could all be K.O’d by a truly gigantic solar storm, always an enormous danger when the sun is at its most ferocious, and this is potentially so serious that governments are taking it very seriously. 

Solar storms may occur very rarely – roughly one-in-100-year events -  but can have catastrophic consequences, and so are increasingly appearing on national risk registers, alongside tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, as reasons to undertake disaster planning.

With a 12% chance of a major event every 10 years – last one happened over 150 years ago – they have to be taken seriously, the threat coming via coronal mass ejections as magnetically-charged plasma gets thrown out by the sun.

Such events see enormous bubbles escaping the surface of the star, sending millions of tons of gas hurtling toward Earth with at best 24 hours warning, capable of triggering geomagnetic storms powerful enough to literally melt expensive transformers in national power grids and disrupt communications world-wide.

It was back in 1989 that a solar storm took out the entire Quebec power network in Canada, leaving millions for a full nine hours without electricity, and such events can easily wreck satellites and radio communications, so the world scientific community keeps a close watch on things, looking to offer early warnings, though in truth very little can be done by feeble humanity when the sun flexes that unimaginable might.