Although humanity continuously reckons with many problems here on Earth — war, political turmoil, epidemics and pandemics, all while the energy, climate, and water crises intensify — it’s important to remember just how relentless the Universe can be. While earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters haven’t exactly ceased in the meantime, there’s a completely different looming threat for which we’re completely unprepared: a solar storm. Rather than the more familiar sets of terrestrial events that can endanger us, it’s the space weather generated by the Sun that has the potential to cause a novel type of harm.
Without any mitigations, widespread electrical fires and power station failures could come alongside damages costing trillions of dollars, impacting the lives of billions of humans on Earth. Historically, the largest recorded solar event occurred back in 1859: the Carrington event. But more than a millennium prior to that, an even stronger cosmic event struck Earth.
We know this because, back in the years spanning 774-775, there was a tremendous spike in the presence of carbon-14 in Earth’s atmosphere, and the evidence is found in tree rings all across the world. After a full decade investigating the possible causes of this spike, the scientific conclusion we’ve reached is that the Sun was to blame. A solar storm from more than 1200 years ago may have been the most powerful one recorded in natural history.
The Earth, as a result, may be at an even greater risk from a worst-case solar storm than anyone thought possible. A solar flare from our Sun, which ejects matter out away from our parent star and into the Solar System, can trigger events like coronal mass ejections. Although the particles typically take ~3 days to arrive, the most energetic events can reach Earth in under 24 hours, and can cause the most damage to our electronics and electrical infrastructure: both on the surface as well as our space/satellite infrastructure.
The science of solar astronomy — where we directly observe the Sun — is a relatively young one. Although sunspots had been referred to and recorded since the 4th century BCE, they were only identified as being inherent to the Sun itself during the time of Galileo in the early 1600s. The observations that these spots not only appeared on the Sun, but migrated across its surface as it rotated, were the first to robustly challenge Aristotle’s notion that the Sun was perfect: without either flaw or motion.
The connection of sunspots to solar flares wouldn’t be made until 1859, when solar astronomerRichard Carrington, while tracking a large, irregular sunspot region, observed what he called a “white light flare” that lasted for approximately five minutes. 18 hours later, the largest geomagnetic storm in recent history occurred on Earth, resulting in: Given the tremendous development, subsequently, of humanity’s electric and electronic infrastructure, it’s easy to see how a similar event, if it were to occur today, could lead to an unprecedented catastrophe, with hints of the type of damage that could ensue coming in the 20th and early 21st centuries. However, a large-magnitude, energetic flare or a coronal mass ejection could do a whole lot of damage to our electrical and electronic infrastructure, costing trillions of dollars and potentially killing and displacing millions. There have been a significant number of solar storms, subsequent to that major 1859 event, that have adversely impacted humanity.
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