“The Carrington Event: How One Solar Storm Could Devastate Our Electric Infrastructure”

The Carrington Event is what happened on September 1 and 2, 1859 – and in addition to knocking out telegraphs, it also caused several fires. It was the largest geomagnetic storm in recorded history, the impact of the Earth’s magnetosphere by a cloud of charged particles that broke away from the Sun during a so-called flare, a sudden observable flare-up. Basically, the point is that the Sun’s magnetic field lines can become so wound up that when they finally come loose, they literally slingshot a chunk of matter into the solar corona, the uppermost part of the atmosphere that is made up mostly of charged particles. That is why such events are called CME, Coronal Mass Ejection.

These events seem to happen all the time, but humanity has not paid much attention to them because our Sun is middle-aged, calm and stable – unlike, for example, M-class stars, red dwarfs, whose flares are absolutely no fun for those around them . Clouds of charged particles move at different speeds, usually flying towards Earth for several days, but the 1859 CME is estimated to have been an exceptionally energetic and fast event – ​​the cloud hit us in just 17.6 hours.

A civilization with a low technical level usually only enjoys an interesting light show, since the aurora borealis (aurea borealis) can reach as far as the equator (in 1859 it was also observable in Colombia) and a little further north it can be visible even during the day. In our latitudes, it can be a phenomenon so intense that you can comfortably read even at night. What looks like fun fun is the result of the photoluminescence of the upper layers of the atmosphere, which brake high-energy solar particles and transfer their energy to them, which the excited gas molecules emit as light. Even Carringtonian events aren’t dangerous enough to give you cancer or other problems, for example, so it seems like a comfort.

The problem arises in the situation when we start using electricity – and especially in the situation when we conduct it through long wires, because the impact of a cloud of charged particles induces currents in them. These can be of different strengths and have different effects. In some places the telegraph operators could not work at all because they received electric shocks from the telegraph, in other places the wires sparkled – and in some places, on the contrary, it made the work easier, as the transcript of the communication between the American Boston and Portland, as recounted by the Boston Evening Traveler of the time: