On the morning of 1st of September 1859, amateur British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from dark sun spots on the solar surface. Although the anomalies were only visible for a few minutes, hours later they would impact on the earth, electrifying the night sky into day and causing the world’s telegraph lines to spew sparks and malfunction.
Named after the astronomer who had observed that initial solar flare, or coronal mass ejection (CME), the Carrington event is still the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded. Carrying their own embedded magnetic fields, CMEs are massive expulsions of solar plasma that the sun occasionally flings in our direction.
The earth’s magnetic field protects our atmosphere from most adverse space weather by deflecting its energy towards the poles, where it dissipates into the beautiful aurorae normally only visible at northern latitudes.
But on that particular evening, the atmosphere over the poles became so highly energised that the geomagnetic circle radiated out around the northern hemisphere, bringing spectacular auroral displays as far south as Rome, Cuba and Mexico.
Although there hasn’t been an electromagnetic storm on that scale since 1859, the sun has been peppering the earth with localised warning shots ever since.
Another Carrington event is regarded as a one-in-100-year occurrence. But now that we are surrounded by machines made out of metal and wire, the next “big one” could damage the national grid and disable communication systems—with severe economic consequences.
When Dominic Cummings gave evidence to parliamentary committees on the pandemic, he specifically criticised the inadequacy of the UK’s planning for severe space weather, warning: “the current government plan is completely hopeless. If that happens then we’re all going to be in a worse situation than Covid.”
Ilan Kelman, professor of disaster and health at UCL, agrees with the PM's outspoken former adviser, citing an ominous “near miss.” On 23rd July 2012—a week before the London Olympics—a CME on the scale of the Carrington event passed within a few days of earth’s orbit. “It was terrifying. It could have caused a level of worldwide disruption costing the global economy tens of trillions in damaged circuits. And it could have taken years until everything was fully functional again.”
Given that another Carrington is eventually inevitable, Kelman thinks the government should learn from its mistakes in handling the pandemic and try to protect the UK by mitigating the worst effects of a global shock.
“They need to prepare an evidence-led response, not an ad hoc, reactive band-aid. We need leadership from a national level, co-ordinated locally through training and drills with a readiness to enact them. At the moment it’s difficult to see how the government could put a rapid recovery in place on the ground. Given that disruption is likely to be significant at latitudes above 45-50 degrees, major populated areas are well within that danger zone. And remote areas will not have electricity for long periods,” he says.
Solar storms are now ranked fourth on the National Risk Register because they have the potential to cause so much disruptive paralysis that health and emergency services become overwhelmed.
Given that it takes between one to three days for a CME to reach earth, early warning systems can mitigate their worst effects, explains Ciaran Beggan, an adviser to the National Grid who works at the British Geological Survey.
“It gives engineering teams time to prepare by suspending maintenance, and using the redundancy in the system. They can open up all the lines of spare capacity to dilute the excess charge by spreading it across the grid.”
He explains that in the event of a mass power outage, supplies are likely to be restored in major cities first. “Longer term disruption is more likely in coastal or rural regions because transformers at the outer edge of power grids are more vulnerable,” he says.
Given that it normally takes eight to 16 weeks to perform an emergency transformer replacement when a spare is available, severe disruption is likely to be regionalised and hit the UK’s already economically challenged coastal communities the hardest.
“Social inequity means that poorest are not prepared and cannot be prepared because of long term vulnerability,” Kelman says. Ideally, they should be ready to be on their own for up to two weeks with a supply of non-perishable food, bottled water, a torch and either a battery-powered or wind-up radio.”
The problem with high impact, low probability events like pandemics and giant geomagnetic storms is that people don't realise how serious they are until they actually occur. As Kelman says, even after the pandemic “there is a still a perception that the UK is a safe place where disasters just don’t happen.”
