When Space Weather Attacks (Apocalypse Edition)
It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.
A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn't create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
That's how Michael Brooks dramatizes a recent NAS report about the possibility that the sun, during a period of intense activity, could shoot off a billion-ton high-energy plasma ball that thwaps Earth and wreaks havoc on our magnetic field. If that happened, the magnetic field could induce extremely strong currents in our power grids that would fry the copper wiring in the transformers. Something like this actually happened in Quebec in 1989—a geomagnetic storm left six million people without power for nine hours—but that was a relatively low-intensity space storm.
How likely is a massive one? Back in 1859, the Carrington event hit Earth—a huge solar flare that produced stunning auroras as far south as the Equator but also disrupted the world's telegraph networks and drove magnetometers haywire. Luckily, the world wasn't totally dependent on high-voltage electric grids back then. But we are today! And if, say, a severe weather event knocked out 300 key transformers in the United States within 90 seconds—as the usually cautious NAS concedes is wholly possible—well, then that'd be 130 million people without power, and it'd take forever to get those transformers back.
