On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically.
Typically, these lights are only visible at higher latitudes, in northern Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia.
What the world experienced that day, now known as theCarrington Event, was a massivegeomagnetic storm.
This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection.
When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet.
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The National Weather Service operates the Space Weather Prediction Center, which watches for solar flares that could lead to geomagnetic storms.
That solar flare produced the largest and fastest rise in carbon-14 ever recorded.
A geomagnetic storm 60% smaller than the Miyake Eventoccurred around A.D. 993.
Nowadays the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses theGeomagnetic Storms scaleto measure the strength of these solar eruptions.
The G scale has a rating from 1 to 5 with G1 being minor and G5 being extreme.
The Carrington Event would have been rated G5.
It gets even scarier when you compare the Carrington Event with the Miyake Event.
There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuation of the Miyake event.
Instead, scientists measured the increase in carbon-14 in tree rings from that time period.
The Miyake Event produced a12% increase in carbon-14.
The storm would affecta majority of the electrical systemsthat people use every day.
Geomagnetic storms generate induced currents, which flow through the electrical grid.
One hundred amperes is equivalent to the electrical service provided to many households.
Currents this size can cause internal damage in the components, leading to large scale power outages.
A geomagnetic storm three times smaller than the Carrington Event occurred in Quebec, Canada, in March 1989.
The stormcaused the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid to collapse.
In this case, the outage led tofive million people being without power for nine hours.
Breaking connections
In addition to electrical failures, communications would be disrupted on a worldwide scale.
High-frequency communication systems such as ground-to-air, shortwave and ship-to-shore radio would be disrupted.
This would lead todisruptionsin satellite-based telephone, internet, radio and television.
This expansion changes the density of the atmosphere where satellites are orbiting.
Higher density atmospherecreates dragon a satellite, which slows it down.
And if it isnt maneuvered to a higher orbit, it can fall back to Earth.
One other area of disruption that would potentially affect everyday life is navigation systems.
Virtually every mode of transportation, from cars to airplanes, use GPS for navigation and tracking.
Military systems are heavily dependent on GPS for coordination.
This would potentially disrupt the entire web link and prevent the servers from connecting to each other.
A Carrington Event-size storm would beextremely damagingto the electrical and communication systems worldwide with outages lasting into the weeks.
In short, its important to work now to minimize the disruptions from the next Carrington Event.
