In early September of 1859 a severe solar storm occurred.
It's also termed the Carrington Event after amateur astronomer Richard Carrington who
was one of the solar observers that witnessed it, though it should be noted that it was
independently observed by another amateur observer Richard Hodgson who happened to be
watching the sun using projection techniques at the time.
What they saw was astonishing.
Numerous sunspots appeared starting around August 28 and over the next few days strong
auroras were observed in Australia.
Now we know that strong auroras indicate strong activity on the sun's surface, and of course
even today we see periods of increased auroras whenever the sun is active.
I've seen them myself occasionally in the northern skies, despite being far from the
polar regions in the American mid-west.
But the Carrington event was in a different class than a normal period of strong aurora
activity.
On the 29th of August, 1859, Carrington and Hodgson made the first observation of a solar
flare.
Coming from this, though they had no idea at the time, was a coronal mass ejection heading
directly towards earth.
We can reconstruct that this ejection crossed the 93 million mile gap between earth and
the sun uncharacteristically rapidly.
It literally took it less than a day, whereas normal mass ejections of this type, which
aren't particularly rare, take a few days.
That strongly suggests that the auroras observed in Australia were due to a previous ejection
a few days before that had cleared a fast-track path for the ejection of the 29th.
When it hit, it led to some amazing effects that were reported worldwide.
Auroras were seen as far south as the west Indies, we're talking south of Florida and
there are even accounts from central Africa, and the bright light even tricked some gold
miners in the western US into getting up and cooking breakfast.
People were reading newspapers outside because the auroras were so strong.
But these were not normal auroras like you would expect as beautiful ribbons crossing
the skies.
This was described as encompassing almost the whole sky, nearly drowning out the stars
and exceeding the brightness of the moon.
Accounts are accounts, and I don't know how accurate that is but it must have been spectacular
regardless, but here's were it gets weird.
At the time the world had begun being interconnected by the telegraph system.
Operators reported receiving electric shocks from their equipment during the event, and
even the towers holding the wires themselves were seen to emit sparks.
In fact, there was so much electromagnetic activity that even when some of the operators
turned their equipment off they found that they could still send messages.
Events like this happen relatively regularly.
A smaller storm knocked the power out in Quebec in 1989 and an event considered to be about
the size of the Carrington event happened in 2012.
We weren't in the path of the ejection, by sheer luck, but if it had hit us we'd have
been in trouble.
After the 2012 event, the venerable old insurance company Lloyd's of London and US researchers
determined that if the kind of event that happened in 1859 were to happen today, it
could do trillions of dollars in damage to the United States electrical and technological
infrastructure alone.
Worldwide it would be much worse.
We can also see evidence of past events like this in the historical record.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 774 A.D.
a red crucifix appeared in the night sky over England.
This was the dark ages in Europe of course, and if they saw something it was probably
a particularly strong or odd aurora, though it's worth noting that astronomers in China
did not seem to see that, and they're known to have been careful recorders of astronomical
events in those days.
But what's interesting about this 774 event is that we have other evidence today that
a coronal mass ejection, seemingly bigger than the Carrington event, happened in 774.
In tree ring studies from that year from around the world, the concentration of carbon-14
is significantly higher than normal which is attributed to the event as well as evidence
in Antarctic ice cores.
It's not clear how frequent earth gets hit by a coronal mass ejection, it seems to be
every thousand or few thousand years for a really large one, and these events have no
clear adverse effect on life itself if its on earth, but they do clearly happen and even
smaller ones are significant threats to astronauts.
But here on earth our technology may be in serious danger, particularly our power grids.
I tend to be a positive guy that focuses on human space exploration and the betterment
of humanity, but preparing our civilization for events like what happened in 774 and the
Carrington event, along with tracking near-earth asteroids, seems like a very good idea.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently proud of myself for
years of successfully thwarting the nefarious plots of the sun by using sunscreen and be
sure to check out my books at your favorite online book dealer and subscribe to my channel
for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this
amazing universe in which we live.