Can we expect " A big One" from the sun After the solar storm recently?
It happened again! Just these days, a strong solar storm hit our planet, giving its inhabitants the
fantastic sight of polar auroras even at low latitudes and causing numerous small annoyances
with all electrical equipment; it even threw off Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite constellation.
We had a similar experience back in 1989 when the power grid in northeastern
Canada was knocked out during a solar storm. In just 90 seconds, the region went from
normal functioning to suddenly six million people without electricity. It took nine hours to reroute
electricity in that part of the power grid. Repairs took months. But that wasn't even a
major solar flare. After an extreme solar storm, the problems would be on a much larger scale.
The one that hit us a few days ago is said to have been the most violent magnetic storm in the
last two decades, and yet, even this one passed without causing major damage...
But how can we be sure that one day a super solar storm won't hit Earth,
capable of killing us instead of just disrupting Musk's satellites and our cell phones?
Some say it feels like our star is sending us warning signals. And that the little
bastard - not at all the friendly source of life with a smiling face usually drawn by
children - has been doing something decidedly unpleasant for millennia: namely, it's been
trying continuously to kill us! And there's no guarantee that it won't succeed one day.
Watch this video, prepared for you by the Insane Curiosity Channel, and then we'll talk again!
Alright, it's any given night in the near future. Without warning, the lights go
out. A sudden loss of electrical power hits the entire country. Air traffic control goes offline,
hospitals switch to backup generators, while the sky is adorned with fluorescent-colored streamers.
The blackout drags on. It seemed like it could be the usual local outage... but hours turn into
days and the power doesn't come back. There's no internet, no television,
no newspapers to tell you what's going on. Soon, the diesel fuel powering hospital emergency
generators run out, and food stops arriving at supermarkets because the fuel for delivery trucks
can't be pumped without electricity. Why isn't anything working anymore?
The first news comes through word of mouth... It seems that this time the Sun means business,
and for at least two days, it's been bombarding us with an extraordinarily powerful solar storm. In
short, the sophisticated technological devices that sustain our chaotic and
complex civilization are being disabled by a hailstorm of wicked particles that
the solar wind is delivering to us with the energy of a thousand atomic bombs.
Once again, the plasma jet ejected from the Sun - that's what we're dealing with
here - completed its journey from the Sun to Earth at nearly a thousand kilometers per second,
covering 150 million kilometers in just a couple of days. And then it took only a few seconds to
breach the defenses of Earth's magnetic field and throw the global power grid into chaos.
The threat comes from outer space, and indeed, it's the neural network of our
artificial satellites that first feels the destructive effect of the incoming
electric charges. Consequently, the cover provided by the Global Positioning System
also goes down, leaving ships, cars, and even anti-theft systems blind.
The event also limits air traffic. Many flights are delayed because aircraft cannot take off
safely. Pilots in flight must continue without GPS and other instruments. Air corridors in polar
regions are closed and routes are diverted. Then all aircraft are grounded before it's too late.
Of course, the TVs go off. But so do the phones. Almost immediately, the water also goes out,
at least in apartment buildings, where the pumps to raise it to the floors are electric.
And household appliances stop working. The goods in large industrial refrigerators rot.
All of this happens because violent induced currents are created in the
energy distribution lines, and the transformers melt; there's no way
to replace or repair them. Spare parts cannot be brought in, and making new ones won't be
possible either because industrial plants, including refineries, are all shut down.
But that's not all… Trains and subways are also unusable. It's even difficult to get gasoline
because there's no electricity to operate the pumps. Pipelines for oil and gas don't
work because they require energy. Nuclear power plants have shut down automatically.
Malfunctions in traffic signal systems cause accidents. Emergency services are difficult to
reach because radio communication is disrupted. Authorities struggle to properly inform the
population about the situation and disseminate recommendations on behavior to follow because
communication channels are partially out of service. Several purification plants no longer
function correctly and discharge polluted water and hazardous substances into the environment.
But the most dangerous substance of all is the one gifted to us by the fury of the Sun…
Solar wind releases high-energy particles that can generate harmful radiation for humans,
similar to low-energy nuclear radiation. The Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere
provide adequate protection at ground level, but astronauts in space are subjected to potentially
lethal doses of ionizing radiation. The penetration of high-energy particles into
cells can cause chromosomal damage, cancer, and other health problems. High doses could be fatal.
After a week, the situation worsens and becomes tragic. Entire categories of patients die:
intensive care units, for example, and dialysis units, the most dependent on machines,
are emptied. Medicines can no longer be found, and supermarket shelves remain
empty. Tall buildings are abandoned. Many seek refuge in the countryside. Nowadays,
everything arrives by order, from medicines to cars, from computers
to spare parts. And when the distribution network breaks down, it's the collapse.
After almost a month, nothing is still working: heating and air conditioning,
ATMs, traffic lights, and industries… everything is still at a standstill.
In banks, people discover that real money hardly exists anymore. They are just numbers on monitors,
now turned off. No one can access their savings. A month after the blackout began, the world is on
the brink. To transmit news, ham radio operators come back into fashion; some
manage to power their radios with solar panels. Does it all seem damn unlikely? Not according to
a report from the National Academy of Sciences, published in the United States in January,
which states that returning to normalcy will take a long time. We're talking about years,
maybe even a decade. And the consequences will be severe: up to 300 million deaths,
in addition to economic damages equal to those of dozens of hurricanes like Katrina.
But on what scale would a storm of this magnitude strike? Well… For communications
and everything related to satellites, the damage would be global. As for electrical problems, the
affected areas would involve entire continents. Regions of the Earth above 45° north and below 45°
south would be more at risk. Paradoxically, the equatorial belt would be more protected
because it's generally less technologically advanced and therefore less vulnerable.
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OK, someone might object, but up until now, you've only talked about the effects… but
exactly, what are these storms made of? From time to time, violent explosions and
eruptions occur on the surface of the Sun, ejecting plasma at speeds of hundreds or
even thousands of kilometers per second. Mass ejections are accompanied by intense gamma, X,
and ultraviolet rays and by an emission of high-energy charged particles. Radioactive
rain can reach the Earth in less than ten minutes, causing an intensification
of electromagnetic radiation (solar storm). The coronal mass ejection weakens Earth's magnetic
field. The disruption triggers geomagnetic and electromagnetic storms in Earth's magnetosphere.
There are basically two phases. In the first immediate phase, the eruption causes
radioactive rain (gamma rays, X-rays, UV rays, protons, etc.). The radiological storm reaches
Earth after 8-12 minutes. In the second phase, which occurs after 18-36 hours, Earth is hit by
a shock front. The particle stream near Earth increases again, and the impact of the shock
with Earth's magnetosphere causes the phenomenon of the magnetic storm. Then the currents induced
by the storm begin to cause damage, and the dramatic sequence of events we described begins…
Why fear the possibility of a super solar storm when so far we have fortunately only experienced
disturbances that, while certainly annoying, were definitely bearable?
Is it just pessimism, or is there more to it? No, there's just an awareness of the fact that
our planet has already dealt with destructive solar events. Our luck has simply been this:
the super storms we know of targeted Earth when our species did not depend at all on
technology as sophisticated as today's. And I'll give you just two examples.
In 1859, the English astronomer Richard Carrington managed to find a correlation between the onset of
solar storms and the appearance of polar auroras. On September 1 of the same year, Earth fell victim
to the most intense solar storm on record. It was called the "Carrington Event" because it
was the scientist himself who first observed, on the solar photosphere, the flare that would
soon disrupt our magnetosphere. The skies over much of the world,
even over Cuba, the Bahamas, and Hawaii, saw splendid polar auroras,
but 18 hours after the observation of the flare, a major geomagnetic storm also occurred on Earth.
Telegraph operators were the first to notice. The keys they used to tap out Morse code moved
on their own, releasing painful electric shocks. Along the very few electrical lines
that existed at the time, there were numerous fires, with wooden poles going up in smoke
and large sections collapsing. The Picayune newspaper of New Orleans reported that crowds
gathered on street corners to watch the auroras. Some feared it was a warning of an impending
disaster, an epidemic, or even the end of the world. In the city of Boston,
it was thought that there was a terrible fire somewhere, but the source couldn't be identified.
A few tens of minutes later, the color of the auroras changed to green,
and then it was understood that it was a phenomenon related to the sky.
In our days, it has been calculated that the solar storm triggered by the flare observed by
Carrington had a power at least 10 times greater than the one that hit Quebec in
1989... and at least 20 times more intense than the one we've just experienced in these days.
It caused no harm, after all, it just put on a show... but only because there wasn't a fragile
technological civilization like ours to devastate! But this is nothing compared to the surprise that
the immense nuclear power plant we call the Sun gave to our late Paleolithic ancestors…
You already know that trees talk to us.. They do so primarily through their woody trunks,
providing us with valuable and timeless information, such as climate change trends,
environmental health insights, and even glimpses into our universe... By examining growth rings
in Scots pine trunks discovered in France, an international team of scientists stumbled
upon traces of an enormous solar storm that occurred over 14,000 years ago – the largest
ever recorded so far. Researchers achieved this by measuring radiocarbon levels in the
remains of ancient trees on the eroded banks of the Drouzet River, in the southern French Alps.
The results unveiled unprecedented radiocarbon spikes dating back 14,300 years. Comparing this
radiocarbon peak with beryllium measurements, a chemical element found in Greenland ice cores,
led the research team to speculate that the spike was caused by a massive solar storm,
linked to the ejection of enormous volumes of energetic particles into Earth's atmosphere.
An event ten times more intense and destructive than the Carrington Event!
Of course, we're delving into the realm of probabilities here... We've only just realized
that the Sun might throw us curveballs in the future, but we still know very little about the
mechanisms governing the emergence of potentially devastating solar flares for our planet.
Humanity does, however, have options. When the next big storm hits us, the consequences could
look very different depending on what we do today. We can design satellites to be more resilient
to geomagnetic storms. We can strengthen our power grids, particularly our transformers like
Quebec spent over $1 billion on after its power outage. While U.S. power transmission providers
have recently initiated this process, their precautions seem to be designed
for weaker storms, not events on the scale of those in 1859 or the Paleolithic era...
So, yes, there's a "Big One" in our relationship with the Sun too. We
expect it, it might come tomorrow, but for now, all we can do is hope it doesn't happen for at
least the next hundred years: the minimum time needed to find solutions and countermeasures.