It wouldn't be a complete global omnicrisis without space weather incidents, and there we have it, interplanetary coronal mass ejections (CME) from the Sun with magnetised superheated plasma and subatomic particles reaching earth.
The concern here is earth might experience another Carrington Event, similar to the 1859 one. That notable event caused serious issues with the telegraph network as the geomagnetic storm the CME caused created pulses of electricity to travel down conductors. Except, a Carrington Event could be much more detrimental in 2024, as there are power grids everywhere, not to mention satellites in the sky and more.
Our national grid operator Transpower, which has had a busy time lately, being dragged into a political circus aimed at promoting the coalition government's gas exploration push, issued a notice saying it had removed some equipment from service to prevent damage to it, as the solar storm was upgraded to G5 from G4 which is as high as that particular scale goes.
The power grid held up as far as we know, ditto the different global navigation satellite systems (GNNS) like GPS. SpaceX customers on Starlink low earth orbit satellite broadband in New Zealand reported receiving "degraded service" notifications, and there were some complete outages too it appears.
Major geomagnetic solar storm happening right now. Biggest in a long time. Starlink satellites are under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far. pic.twitter.com/TrEv5Acli2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2024
Overall, Starlink seems to be OK, but if not, please send comments on your experience. Musk has good reason to be worried, as an earlier solar storm in February 2023 saw Starlink lose 49 satellites.
Apart from there being heaps more electrical equipment and devices that are potentially vulnerable to geomagnetic storms these days, one big difference between 1859 and now is of course the sheer volume of amazing pictures of the Northern and Southern Lights that have been published on social media and everywhere.
Truly stunning images they are too. Central Auckland was a light-pollution disappointment, with only a tinge of pink and scarlet in the sky being visible, but almost everywhere else was treated to some amazing night time sights, courtesy of Solar Cycle 25.
We're not done with Solar Cycle 25 which started in December 2019 and which will probably continue until 2030. In fact, we're in the peak of that cycle, the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated.
All eyes on the skies then, for the next few months at least. Solar storms have the potential to cause trillions of dollars worth of damage, and it's good to see precautions are being taken. In 2003, a G5 solar storm caused a power outage in Sweden, disabled transformers in South Africa and damaged satellites.
Similarly, a 1989 solar storm caused serious problems in North America, including a nine-hour outage for the Quebec power grid.
In this age of rampant misinformation, it’s simply not possible to have a spectacular event of this scale without triggering online conspiracy theorists.
What did they come up with this time to explain the aurora? Jewish Space Lasers amplified by 5G? Nanoparticle mRNA vaccine vapour chemtrails making the night skies glow in menacing multicolour?
No, it was the HAARP which stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme that popped up again. This is a very interesting research programme that studies the ionosphere, and which among other things might be able to detect and learn the composition of asteroids moving uncomfortably close to the Earth.
Conspiracy theorists on the other hand don't believe that and instead think the HAARP is a crazy weapon that can manipulate the weather, burn the planet and what have you. At length. If you haven't come across any HAARP-y stuff yet, worry not, such tinfoil wearer generated content is guaranteed to arrive soon at your favourite poorly moderated social network.
Update In North America, a John Deere dealership said the tractor maker's real-time kinetic (RTK) positioning systems were degraded, sending out incorrect information and should be switched off with older systems used instead. The issue was first reported by 404Media.
"Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic," the dealership said. Older Starfire 2 and 3 systems don't get the RTK systems and worked better, but they too were degraded.
Not having accurate positioning is problematic for farmers planting crops, as it needs to be done accurately in straight rows, and at the right time of the year with delays in sowing potentially growing and harvest problems. Inaccurate positioning of farming vehicles could cause crop damage as well.
RTK relies on Global Positioning System (GPS) signals, suggesting the geomagnetic storm may have caused problems for satellite-based navigation in parts of the world.
8 Comments
"...Earth might experience another Carrington Event..."
We would immediately be thrown into a world that has not existed for over 100 years. We'd probably recover within a couple of years but a substantial part of our population would likely starve in the interim.
These events, like pandemics, you just hope that they don't happen.
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