- [Narrator] It would start with a blast.
A huge massive of plasma spewing
from the surface of the Sun.
- These are giant eruptions that can send
the energy equivalent of 10,000 category five hurricanes
hurdling through space in some direction,
sometimes they hit Earth.
- [Narrator] Energetic particles could knock into satellites
disrupting GPS.
Astronauts could get hit with a heavy dose of radiation.
Geomagnetic disturbances could knock out power grids.
In a severe case, this could last hours, days, or even weeks
in some places.
Economists who've modeled this out place potential risks
at tens of billions of dollars per day.
- Because the last really big solar storm
to hit the Earth happened in the late 1800s,
there just wasn't all of this electronic
and grid and space infrastructure that we rely on now.
So some of that infrastructure could be affected
by a big solar storm.
- [Narrator] Severe solar storms don't hit Earth often,
but scientists and utilities operators
spend time preparing for them because they're inevitable
and potentially catastrophic.
(tense music)
Solar storms often have a few major components,
solar flares, solar energetic particles,
and coronal mass ejections.
- The Sun is essentially a boiling ball of gas.
When you're making pasta, right, you get those bubbles
in a convection pattern that are coming to the surface
and then releasing their air into the steam.
It's very similar to that on the surface of the Sun, right?
We have these convection patterns
that we can actually see where you have hotter plasma
from the interior of the Sun that's coming up,
and then it cools and it goes back down.
As those things convect,
we also have not only the hot ionized gas
but also the electromagnetic fields are tied up
with that plasma.
And so the configuration of those electromagnetic fields
can actually cause some of that plasma to come up
above the visible surface of the Sun.
And as it comes up you can kind of think about it
like a soap bubble, right?
It extends to a point where it no longer is stable
and kind of pinches off that bubble of plasma
that can then go streaming into space.
- [Narrator] Economists have modeled
exactly how all this science could play out
and cost the US economy billions of dollars.
- So we know that if there was a space weather event
it would mean that the US economy
would see somewhere between 10 to $40 billion worth
of gross domestic product lost per day.
So it depends how many days potentially the grid
might be down.
- [Narrator] Edward Oughton has spent the last decade
modeling the socioeconomic impacts of severe space weather.
- Satellite constellations would be the first assets
that would be affected.
The radiation impacts that take place from the solar flare
would affect those assets in orbit.
- [Narrator] The next wave of effects could hit anywhere
from 16 hours to several days later.
- Essentially, you would start to see power grids
on the dark side of the Earth being affected.
Geomagnetic storms induce geomagnetic currents
which flow into the power grids and cause problems
with the operation of that particular infrastructure system.
And obviously if we lose power
then we're likely to lose a lot of other
key lifeline critical infrastructures
which we all depend on.
Telecommunications, transportation services, water services,
financial services, these types of really important things
that we all use on a daily basis.
- [Narrator] Experts have long disagreed
on how severe the ramifications might be.
Some have hypothesized a so-called internet apocalypse
that could disconnect entire countries from the web
or power outages that would last years.
- The debate was whether this might take months or years
to replace damaged critical infrastructure assets
such as extra high voltage transformers.
But I think the key point to make is that once the grids
actually shut itself off, it's not exposed anymore.
I think there's a lot that we don't know.
We don't have the data to understand
how many of those critical infrastructure sectors
actually connect together.
It's those types of unpredictable outcomes
that plague our models.
- [Narrator] Significant solar storms have hit Earth before.
- [Reporter] Like a big circuit breaker,
the whole system shut down.
They don't know, but they suspect
it may have something to do with solar flares.
- When you ask scientists about this,
they'll say that a really devastating solar storm happens
on Earth only about once every 150 years.
The most famous solar storm happened in the late 1800s,
that was called the Carrington Event.
And it was such a big solar storm that it caused the aurora
you know, the Northern Lights to go all the way down.
You could see it in the Caribbean at the time
and it caused telegraph lines to kind of be overloaded
by electrical charge, and they sparked,
and some of them caught fire
and it shut down the telegraph system in North America.
But there have been many solar storms since.
In the 1920s, there was one that shut down railroads
in and around New York City
and caused a building to catch fire.
There was one in the 1970s
which set off 4,000 magnetically sensitive undersea mines
in the waters of Vietnam.
And at the same time,
it fooled a Department of Defense satellite
into thinking that the Russians had set off a nuclear bomb.
And most recently, in 1989 there was a large solar storm,
which actually shut down the power grid in Quebec
for nine hours.
- [Narrator] The 1989 solar storm caused 6 million people
to lose power in Quebec,
but that was a much smaller coronal mass ejection
than the ones many experts worry about today.
- We're seeing an increased number of solar storms.
We've been a little bit excited
about how active the Sun is getting
because it's a very exciting time to be studying the Sun
and near Earth space.
That being said, it also means that there's a lot more
complications from space weather that are potentially there
because we haven't experienced them over the last,
you know two decades or so.
- [Narrator] To avoid a worst case scenario
scientists and industry experts have been working
on better forecasting tools and industry safeguards.
- We actually have this obscure corner
of the Federal Government
called the Space Weather Prediction Center
and they're able to give us some advanced warning
but it's limited because our best probe
for assessing whether a solar storm is coming toward us
can only give us maybe an hour's notice, maybe a half hour.
- There's a lot of complicated physics
that we have to try to model.
And trying to do that in this entire coupled system
from the Sun to the ground at Earth
takes a lot of computing power.
Luckily, we now have computers that can handle that.
We also have more data coming online,
especially from new spacecraft,
and we're able to ingest more of that data
into what we call empirical models.
And then last but not least, we also have new techniques
like machine learning and artificial intelligence
which is kind of this burgeoning field
that we're able to start applying to space weather
and you know what is a very hard problem
that might be well-suited to some of these techniques.
- [Narrator] Given some warning,
power grid operators could deploy crews
to make sure critical components like transformers
are working properly and try to keep components
from overheating.
Satellites could be moved into a safe hold configuration.
- Space weather has really been a growing emphasis
over the last few decades.
It's definitely something that Federal Government
is getting more and more acute awareness of.
- [Narrator] In the past decade,
regulators have begun to issue guidelines to deal
with the threat of solar storms.
After years of experts flagging concerns,
groups like the North American Electric Reliability
Corporation began to develop and enforce standards
for grid operators to mitigate the effects.
Many experts are optimistic
that Earth will be able to avoid a worst case scenario
the next time a major solar storm hits.
But it's impossible to precisely simulate a solar storm
that hasn't happened yet.
- I think the number one concern among the experts
that I've talked to about what's it gonna take for us
to really be prepared for solar storms is that one will hit,
and some of its impacts will be ones
that we just didn't really predict.
Like maybe we were prepared for a certain type of big flux
of electricity in the grid and it overwhelming transformers
but maybe there's some other part of the grid
that we're just not even thinking about
that gets tripped by this.
So I think experts are the most worried
about the unknown unknowns that'll occur
the next time we have a big solar storm.
(suspenseful music)