Oliver Johnson
David Wallace is an assistant clinical professor of electrical engineering at Mississippi State University.
O geomagnetic storm started on May 10, 2024, generated stunning northern lightsmore commonly known as the aurora borealis, which can be seen as far south as Mexico. They also created headaches for farmers whose GPS-guided tractors were stopped in the middle of the planting season.
Geomagnetic storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from the Sun’s surface and hits Earth. This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection. The plasma from a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena.
The storm of May 2024, classified as G5 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 1-to-5 Scale of geomagnetic storms, disrupted GPS communications enough to disrupt the tractor’s orientation, which requires centimeter precision. Stronger storms would have much more serious consequences. As a electric engineer An expert in electrical networks, I study how geomagnetic storms also threaten to cause power and internet outages and how to protect myself against them.
Geomagnetic storms
Stronger solar storms happened and one of them wreaked havoc on an early electronic technology. On September 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. Telegraph operators reported receiving electric shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the nights, the Northern Lights it could be seen as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights are only visible at higher latitudes, in northern Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia.
What the world experienced that day, now known as the Carrington Event, was the largest recorded report of a geomagnetic storm, much stronger than the May 2024 storm.
Geomagnetic storms have been recorded since the early 19th century, and scientific data from Antarctic ice cores has shown evidence of an even more massive geomagnetic storm that occurred around 774 AD, known as the Miyake Event. This solar flare produced the largest and fastest increase in carbon-14 ever recorded. Geomagnetic storms unleash large amounts of cosmic rays into Earth’s upper atmosphere, which in turn produce carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
A geomagnetic storm 60% smaller than the Miyake Event occurred around 993 AD. Ice core samples have shown evidence that large-scale geomagnetic storms with intensities similar to the Miyake and Carrington events occur at an average rate of once every 500 years.
Scientists have managed to estimate the strength of the Carrington Event based on fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field as recorded by the observatories of the time. There was no way to measure the magnetic fluctuation of the Miyake Event. Instead, scientists measured the increase in carbon-14 in tree rings over that period. The Miyake Event produced a 12% increase in carbon-14. In comparison, the Carrington Event produced less than a 1% increase in carbon-14, so the Miyake Event likely surpassed the G5 Carrington Event.
Bringing down the power
Today, a geomagnetic storm of the same intensity as the Carrington Event would affect much more than telegraph wires and could be catastrophic. With increasing dependence on electricity and emerging technology, any disruption could lead to trillions of dollars in monetary losses and risks to lives dependent on the systems. The storm would affect most electrical systems that people use every day.
Geomagnetic storms generate induced currents, which flow through the electrical grid. Geomagnetically induced currents, which can exceed 100 amps, flow to grid-connected electrical components such as transformers, relays and sensors. One hundred amps is equivalent to the electrical service provided to many homes. Currents of this size can cause internal damage to 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 storm caused the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid. During the storm, high magnetically induced currents damaged a transformer in New Jersey and tripped the grid’s circuit breakers. In this case, the interruption led to 5 million people without power for nine hours.
Breaking connections
In addition to electrical failures, communications would be interrupted on a global scale. Internet service providers could go down, which in turn would eliminate the ability of different systems to communicate with each other. High-frequency communications systems, such as ground-to-air radio, shortwave, and ship-to-shore radio, would be disrupted. Satellites in orbit around Earth can be damaged by geomagnetic storm-induced currents that burn out their circuit boards. This would lead to interruptions on satellite telephone, internet, radio and television.
Additionally, as geomagnetic storms hit Earth, increased solar activity causes the atmosphere to expand outward. This expansion changes the density of the atmosphere where the satellites orbit. Higher density atmosphere creates drag on a satellite, which slows it down. And if it isn’t maneuvered into a higher orbit, it could fall back to Earth.
Another area of disruption that could potentially affect everyday life is navigation systems. Virtually all forms of transportation, from cars to planes, use GPS for navigation and tracking. Even wearable devices like cell phones, smart watches and tracking tags rely on GPS signals sent by satellites. Military systems rely heavily on GPS for coordination. Other military detection systems, such as over-the-horizon radars and submarine detection systems, could be disrupted, which would harm national defense.
In internet terms, a geomagnetic storm on the scale of the Carrington Event could produce geomagnetically induced waves. currents in submarine and terrestrial cables that form the backbone of the Internet, as well as the data centers that store and process everything from emails and text messages to scientific datasets and artificial intelligence tools. This would potentially disrupt the entire network and prevent servers from connecting to each other.
Just a matter of time
It’s only a matter of time before Earth is hit by another major geomagnetic storm. A storm the size of the Carrington Event would be extremely damaging to electrical and communications systems around the world, with outages lasting weeks. If the storm is the size of the Miyake Event, the results would be catastrophic for the world, with possible disruptions lasting months, if not longer. Even with space weather warnings from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the world would only have a few minutes to a few hours’ notice.
I believe it is essential to continue researching ways to protect electrical systems against the effects of geomagnetic storms, for example, through installation of devices that can protect vulnerable equipment such as transformers and developing strategies to adjust grid loads when solar storms are about to occur. In short, it is important to work now to minimize disruption from the upcoming Carrington Event.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on The Conversation on March 18, 2022 and republished under a Creative Commons license. It has been updated to include news of the May 2024 solar storm.
