A few days ago, the surface of the sun erupted, sending millions of tonnes of superheated gas hurtling towards Earth at speeds of up to 90 million miles per hour.
Even while the explosion, known as a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t exceptionally strong on the space-weather scale, it created the biggest geomagnetic storm observed in years when it collided with Earth’s magnetic field. This time around, the sun’s reawakening caused minimal inconvenience, and in fact, most people probably didn’t even notice.
While the geomagnetic waves released by solar storms are invisible and pose no threat to people on Earth’s surface, they can disrupt electrical systems, interfere with radio communications, expose aeroplane crews to harmful radiation levels, and knock essential satellites out of orbit. With the sun having started a new 11-year cycle last year and reaching its peak in 2025, the prospect of powerful space weather inflicting havoc for humanity grows, threatening upheaval in a world that has become progressively more dependent on technology since the last major storms hit 17 years ago. Recent research estimated that the United States electricity sector might gain $27 billion by grid hardening.
Caitlin Durkovich, senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council and special assistant to President Joe Biden, said at a solar-weather conference last month, “It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction.”
This risk is not theoretical. Ham radios went dead during 2017’s Category 5 Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean because of a solar storm. It is concerning that global positioning systems in the Northeastern United States were disrupted by solar storms in 2015. Cataracts are more common in airline pilots during solar storms. Miscarriages are more common among crew members who are women. According to Hydro-Quebec’s website, a nine-hour statewide blackout occurred in March 1989 as a result of a solar storm across the province. According to a 2017 research published in the Journal of the American Geophysical Union, severe space weather might create blackouts that affect as much as 66% of the U.S. population, resulting in daily economic losses of $41.5 billion.
To prevent such a disaster, President Obama’s administration has sketched out a plan to begin warning the public about the hazards posed by major solar storms and evaluating those risks. In an effort to better predict and measure space weather phenomena, President Trump signed the ProSwift bill into law last year. The extent to which critical infrastructure on Earth can be protected from solar storms is a topic of contention among experts. Better forecasting may be the best defence against calamity, but other measures such as utilising non-magnetic steel in transformers and adding additional surge protectors to the system could help.
That would be a huge aid to utilities in planning for power outages and creating backup routes for their systems. The University of Michigan has developed a new model that will aid enhance Earth-bound forecasting when it goes live in the coming weeks. Mark Prouse, deputy director of the British government’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, indicated that preparations were being made by National Grid to deal with a big space weather event through the acquisition of spare transformers and the holding of frequent exercises. In order to protect airlines, power grids, satellite owners, and anybody else who could be affected by solar flares, the United States and the United Kingdom have established space weather forecasting centres during the past 15 years. When explosive storms erupt on the sun, watchers on Earth can see them, but they won’t know the full extent of the threat until the blast reaches a group of satellites 1 million miles from Earth. By then, it will be within 60–90 minutes before it reaches the planet.
According to William Murtagh, director of the United States Space Weather Prediction Centre, “Our ability to understand and predict the solar cycle is still very limited.”
According to Mark Olson, reliability assessment manager for the North America Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit accountable to the governments of the United States and Canada, utilities could take similar precautions ahead of a solar storm as they do for a severe thunderstorm by staging repair workers nearby. Olson warned that “very large areas” could experience voltage instability. “Just as with terrestrial weather events, situational awareness is essential.”
The polarity of the sun’s magnetic field reverses on an 11-year cycle, which is the fundamental cause of solar storms. During this time, the sun’s magnetic forces become entangled, causing the sun to erupt through its surface and release its plasma into space, which can then cause storms on Earth. The Carrington Event of 1859 was the most violent geomagnetic storm ever recorded; it caused telegraph cables to electrify, zapping operators and setting offices in North America and Europe on fire. Such a storm today would likely leave millions, if not billions, without electricity.
“When I first started down this path and was briefed on space weather, I raised an eyebrow,” said Prouse. There is less of a mystery surrounding it now that it has entered the mainstream. You can bring it up as a potential problem without anyone laughing at you.
