The Carrington Effect
 | Author:
Jeff ross
Contributor |
The Carrington Effect
As I write this, a major sunspot system has rotated toward our Earth and has the potential to send some really big Coronal Mass Ejections our way. Those CME's almost always result in stunning auroral displays if they actually strike the Earth's magnetosphere. I remember one when I was a student at Montana State University in 1975. I was walking home from a study session at the MSU Library at about 10 pm. As I left the library and looked up, I was amazed to see the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) completely covering the northern horizon, stretching all the way from the horizon to the zenith overhead and a little beyond.
It was a stunning auroral display. Shifting curtains of green and red accompanied me home that night. Once I got back to the basement apartment that was home I tried to rouse my roommate to come see but he was unwilling to leave a warm bed to see lights in the sky. His loss.
Amazing as these auroral displays are, I would not want to diminish the potential that a really strong CME would havoc.
On September 1 and 2, 1859 one of the largest geomagnetic storms (as recorded by ground-based magnetometers) occurred. Auroras were seen as far south as the Caribbean and in the US the auroral storm was strong enough to start fires from telegraph lines and to burn down the telegraph offices!
Will this current sunspot system spawn a CME that strong? It's certainly capable but let's hope not. Even though most satellites are now "hardened", a Carrington Event-type auroral storm could literally bring satellite communications down, taking with it the entire Internet.
While it might be a welcome respite from the never-ending onslaught of disinformation that we internet users now endure, loss of the internet would be a huge blow to the global economy, expanding into areas we can barely imagine.
With luck the CMEs this solar storm sends our way will not that be severe and we'll be rewarded with stunning auroral displays instead.
With clear skies of course.
