Carrington Event: Unearthing the Most Powerful Solar Storm in History

The Carrington Event in 1859 was historic. According to reports, the extreme solar storm was the greatest in history.

What's The Carrington Event?

A significant solar storm called the Carrington Event occurred at the start of September 1859, just before the 1860 solar maximum.

The expansion of sunspots on the solar disk in August 1859 captivated the attention of astronomers worldwide. One of them was Richard Carrington, an amateur astronomer from the English town of Redhill, close to London, Space.com reported.

Carrington was drawing the sunspots on Sept. 1, 1859, when he was suddenly dazzled by a burst of light. According to NASA spacecraft, Carrington called it a "white light flare." The entire process took around five minutes.

A massive coronal mass ejection (CME), or flare, is a burst of magnetized plasma that leaves the sun's corona, its upper atmosphere. The CME traveled more than 90 million miles (150 million km) between the sun and Earth in 17.6 hours before striking Earth with all its fury. NASA spacecraft claims that it typically takes several days for CMEs to reach Earth.

According to NASA Science, Earth endured an exceptional geomagnetic storm the day after Carrington saw the magnificent flare, which caused telegraph systems to malfunction and made auroral displays, typically only visible at polar latitudes, viewable in the tropics.

The telegraph operators claimed that when they touched the equipment, they experienced electric shocks. A spontaneous fire broke out in the telegraph paper and some equipment that wasn't connected started operating, per Hindustan Times.

A similar incident now would result in tenfold more devastation because the world depends heavily on satellites and wireless technology.

Putting two and two together, Carrington concluded that the solar flare he had just witnessed was almost certainly the origin of this significant geomagnetic disturbance. NASA Spaceflight claimed that no one had ever built a connection like this. In his honor, the solar storm of 1859 is often referred to as the Carrington Event.

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The Carrington Event Solar Storm Lesson

The use of electricity is essential to our culture. Our lives are extended through circuits, ranging from hospital power systems to refrigerators and refrigerated rooms that store food to cellphones and computers that control our financial balances. A globe affected by a strong geomagnetic storm would be without electricity for days, even weeks, and in some places, even months, according to Alberto Laratro.

Transformers at power plants would suffer irreparable harm if they were exposed to current flows far higher than their capability. An outage would result from their merging. There would be major issues if an entire nation had prolonged power outages.

From the availability of drinking water (pump failure prevents water from flowing) to non-refrigerated food, from disrupted transport systems to businesses and industries unable to operate. A geomagnetic storm would cause significant harm to a civilization. But how likely is such an occurrence, and what can we do to lessen the damage? Thus, the Carrington Event should be a lesson for us to learn and prepare for.

Meanwhile, according to Alan Woodward, the Carrington Event appears to qualify as a "Black Swan" event, which is an extremely unusual occurrence that, if it did happen, would have a significant impact. However, he noted that even with the increased solar activity we saw in 2013, there is little chance that Earth will be affected by a similar incident.