Could huge sunburst unplug Earth?
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When the sun got ornery in 1859, American telegraph operators saw sparks fly.
A huge solar flare belched a cloud of charged particles into Earth’s path. But other than frying telegraph lines, the electromagnetic collision caused little stir in the world.
Nobody back then had yet switched on a decent light bulb, much less charged an iPhone.
Yet the sun hasn’t changed its ways, and that worries University of Kansas physicist Adrian Melott, among others. What if the remnants of a similar solar flare struck the planet today?
“Gee, I’d be without cable TV,” Melott deadpanned.
Without email too, some fear. No heating or cooling. No electric grid.
Satellite technology, it was nice knowing you.
A silent disaster
This is the scenario rolling out from a growing network of scientists, policymakers and survivalists. Not quite doomsday because life itself would continue, but a silent natural disaster that could unplug us from all we depend upon.
“It’s happened before, as recently as 1989,” said astrophysicist David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “That geomagnetic storm took out a big transformer in New Jersey.”
Still, it was no “Carrington event,” named for British astronomer Richard Carrington, who charted the 1859 solar burst.
Scientists today regard what happened in 1989 as a mere sun-to-Earth wake-up call, an electromagnetic puff, though strong enough to knock out power in Quebec and parts of the U.S. Northeast.
Hathaway said the Big One, Carrington-style, “could be catastrophic,” leaving much of North America without juice for months or years.
A 2009 study by the National Academy of Sciences warned that a mas- sive geomagnetic assault on satellites and interconnected power grids could result in a blackout from which the nation might need four to 10 years to recover. Sound like Y2K? “The Earth is in peril, and people love that,” said Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “There is this certain human fascination with disaster.
“This one’s a little eccentric. But given a world so interconnected and dependent on technology, with all our cellphones and computers, there’s some legitimate scientific concern about this.”
Odds of an electronics Armageddon anytime soon are far from clear.
Because solar storms occur regularly, with magnetic loops flaring and twisting around sunspots, government weather scientists say it’s inevitable that Earth will, on rare occasion, get bonked by what they call a “coronal mass ejection.”
A cloud of solar plasma, depending on the magnetic makeup of its electrons, could penetrate and shake the planet’s magnetic field, if the sun’s aim is just so.
Some say a super CME, capable of shorting out satellites around the globe and frying electric lines across a continent, might be a once-in-a-century event.
In May 2012, a U.S. Geological Survey report estimated a 6 percent chance of another Carrington event occurring in the next decade.
That 1859 buzz
Still other researchers, such as NASA’s Hathaway, point out that for an event that big, the statistics are too flimsy to measure.
The uncertainty rests in the relatively brief span of time in which scientists have recorded a link between sunbursts and electromagnetic fluctuations on Earth, the first being Carrington’s observations on Sept. 1, 1859.
And even then, the world knew about it only because an emerging technology went haywire.
“Telegraph systems, the Internet of that age,” said Daniel Baker, director of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Sparks shocked telegraph operators and set fire to their paper.
Electric surges created enough juice in some telegraph lines that operators were able to communicate even after disconnecting their batteries.
According to newspaper accounts, the Northern Lights could be viewed as far south as the Caribbean, the result of electrically charged particles from the sun entering Earth’s atmosphere.