Here’s How This One-Of-A-Kind Superstorm Brought The Entire World To Its Knees

For two days, people watched in dread and awe as the bizarre effects of the Carrington Event played out. Millions of miles out into space, two flares had burst forth from the sun, kickstarting the most intense solar storm since records began. And back on Earth, this caused all manner of chaos to unfold.

As the solar storm raged, the planet was plunged into turmoil. Birds sang in the middle of the night, telecommunications ground to a halt and oceans, reflecting the fiery skies, turned the color of blood. Faced with these strange events, many believed that the end times had finally come – and that the apocalypse was just around the corner.

Of course, the world didn’t end, and the Carrington Event was ultimately consigned to the annals of history. But scientists fear that a similar event today could spell disaster on an unimaginable scale. So how did a solar storm create such turmoil? And what might happen if the events of 1859 played out again in the modern era?

Beginning on September 1, 1859, the Carrington Event saw all manner of eerie phenomena occur in different locations across the globe. Certainly the most magical, though, were the auroras that created dazzling light shows in the sky. From Cuba to South Carolina, locals were shocked by the colorful and unexpected displays.

Typically, the auroras known as the Northern Lights are only seen in regions close to the pole, such as Norway, Iceland and Lapland. But during the Carrington Event they were spotted over Cuba and Jamaica, just 1,500 miles from the equator. And in some places, the effect was so bright that it was mistaken for daylight.

According to the website History.com, workers in South Carolina rose to the lights of the aurora and began their day’s work – only to discover that it was still the middle of the night. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles north in Bealeton, Virginia, a flock of larks woke up at one in the morning and began singing. Sadly, a frustrated railroad conductor reportedly shot several dead.

In the Rocky Mountains, a 2008 article for magazine Scientific American detailed, a group of gold miners also mistook the light from the aurora for morning and duly began preparing breakfast. And over in the Australian state of Victoria, others engaged in the same profession also spotted an aurora – this time the Southern Lights, or Aurora Australis – above the small town of Rokewood.

“Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7:00 p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself,” C.F. Herbert, who witnessed the Rokewood incident, told Perth newspaper The Daily News in 1909.    

“Lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens,” Herbert continued, “one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length.”

In fact, the lights were said to have been so bright that people could see well enough to read a newspaper illuminated only by the aurora. And in some places, the spectacle turned the sky an alarming shade of crimson – so vibrant that it appeared as if the neighborhood was aflame.

“The eastern sky appeared of a blood-red color,” one witness in South Carolina told local newspaper the Charleston Mercury. “It seemed brightest exactly in the east, as though the full moon, or rather the Sun, [was] about to rise. It extended almost to the zenith. The whole island was illuminated. The sea reflected the phenomenon and no one could look at it without thinking of the passage in the Bible which says, ‘The sea was turned to blood.’ The shells on the beach, reflecting light, resembled coals of fire.”

Meanwhile, in newspaper The National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, another witness waxed similarly lyrical about the aurora. They said, “The light appeared in streams, sometimes of a pure milky whiteness and sometimes of a light crimson. The white and rose-red waves of light as they swept to and from the corona were beautiful beyond description, and a friend near by us, while looking to the zenith with the whole heavens and earth lighted up at a greater brilliancy than is afforded by the full moon, said that it was like resting beneath the wings of the Almighty.”

As people marveled at the auroras, though, something equally as bizarre was happening in telegraph offices around the world. Back then of course, telephony and other later global systems such as TV and the internet were still many years off. But there was still a communications industry, and these facilities were an essential part of everyday life. 

Even before the Carrington Event, experts had learned that atmospheric conditions were capable of affecting the technology used to send and receive telegraphs. But nothing could have prepared them for what would happen at the beginning of September 1859. As the solar storm flared, equipment and infrastructure went into meltdown across the board.

According to History.com, some claimed that fiery sparks from telegraph machinery ignited papers and shocked the people operating them. Over in Washington D.C., for example, Frederick W. Royce was allegedly hit by an “arc of fire” that leaped from the equipment to his head. In other places, powerful currents heated the contacts, which were made from durable platinum, towards melting point.

In Boston, History.com reported, operators arrived at work on the morning of September 2 to find that they could neither receive nor transmit telegrams. They could, though, do something altogether more remarkable. Even with their batteries switched off, it seems, they were still able to send messages to Portland in Maine, more than 100 miles away.

According to reports, this bizarre situation continued for about two hours before a degree of normality returned to the operation. And even then, staff still struggled to send and receive telegrams for the remainder of the morning. In other places, a 2005 study on the Carrington Event notes, disruptions continued for upwards of eight hours.

“Yesterday morning at about 10:00 a.m., the wires of the electric telegraph were seized with an unaccountable fit of restiveness,” read an eyewitness account in The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in 1859, “they did not altogether refuse to work, but acted irregularly, the adjustment of the instruments altering so frequently that it was almost impossible to get any continuous message through. Everywhere the instruments were jammed.”

Even at the time, of course, witnesses soon realized that the strange things happening to the telegraph system were probably linked to the lights appearing in the sky. But how exactly did a solar storm cause such chaos around the world? And what would happen if we experienced another Carrington Event today?

The first indicator that something was amiss was spotted by Richard Carrington, an astronomy enthusiast who had built a private observatory on his English estate. According to reports, it was a clear morning when he turned his telescope skywards – and spotted a number of dark patches scattered across the surface of the Sun. 

As Carrington watched, two bright jets of light emerged from the dark patches, streaming across the sky for just five minutes before disappearing. To the untrained eye, it might have seemed little more than an interesting quirk of the cosmos. But hours later, the effects of the solar flares were being felt around the world.

Interestingly, this incident on September 1 was not the first time that Carrington had spotted unusual activity on the surface of the sun. Four days earlier, on August 28 he had observed a number of dark patches, known as sunspots, beginning to form. And around the same time, the first reports of unusual auroras began to trickle in.

It didn’t take long, though, for these sunspots to trigger a solar flare. According to experts, this happens when our star’s magnetic field lines become entwined, causing a massive burst of energy to be released. And this reaction, of course, was what Carrington witnessed when he saw jets of light erupting from the Sun.

But these solar flares weren’t the only things happening in the heavens back in late summer 1859. As the storm raged across the surface of the Sun, it released something called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. Typically, this intense burst of magnetic energy can take several days to reach the Earth – but in this case, it hit in less than 18 hours.

It was this CME, then, rather than the solar flares, that caused most of the chaos experienced during the Carrington Event. Essentially a bundle of supercharged particles, this phenomenon interacts with the magnetic field here on Earth, causing all manner of electromagnetic issues. And that’s why the telegraph system, which was reliant on these energies, went haywire back in 1859.

So how did this CME reach our planet from the Sun in record time? Today, scientists believe that another, smaller ejection occurred in late August, around the time that the unusual auroras were first witnessed around the world. And, according to NASA, this incident “cleared the path” of obstacles that normally would have retarded the particles.

In fact, CMEs are not quite as rare as you might think. Addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 the Space Weather Prediction Center’s Tom Bogdan explained, “The Sun has an activity cycle, much like hurricane season.” And when the star is at its liveliest, during the period known as the solar maximum, it can produce as many as three ejections in 24 hours.

In September 1859 Carrington, along with his friend Richard Hodgson, became the first people to witness a solar flare first-hand. But it wasn’t the first time that such activity had caused problems back on Earth. Some 18 years earlier, in 1841 unusual space weather had led to disruptions in the telegraph technology used for managing the railroads.

As it turns out, solar activity has been responsible for a number of anomalies over the years. In 1582, for example, a powerful geomagnetic storm hit the Earth, creating auroras in the skies as far south as Texas and Mexico. At the time, though, the link between CMEs and these dazzling light shows would have been little understood.

Currently, the Carrington Event is thought to be the most powerful incident of its kind since records began. But that doesn’t mean that the Sun has gone quiet. In the years since, a number of solar storms have wreaked havoc around the world, such as the 1921 CME that knocked out electronic signal systems in New York. 

Later, in 1972 another solar storm disrupted telephone lines, particularly those dealing with long-distance calls, across the United States. Seventeen years after that, a similar incident disabled large parts of the electrical grid across Canada. And these events haven’t just been limited to the technology down here on planet Earth, either.

In July 2000 the strongest solar storm since 1989 struck, damaging satellites that were in orbit around the planet. And three years later, another powerful disturbance swamped X-ray equipment on the NASA weather station that had been tasked with observing it. Then, in 2006 a further tempest caused even more upheaval in outer space. 

These storms, though, haven’t been nearly as strong as the one that struck in 1859. So what would happen if another incident of that magnitude unfolded today? The short answer is, nothing good. In fact, many experts believe that something similar to the Carrington Event happening in the 21st century could cause destruction on an unimaginable scale.  

The problem, you see, is that the telecommunications industry today is so much more advanced – and so much more integral to everyday life – than it was in 1859. Speaking to National Geographic magazine, the University of Colorado’s Daniel Baker said, “We live in a cyber cocoon enveloping the Earth. Imagine what the consequences might be.”

In other words, a solar storm as powerful as the Carrington Event today could have wide-reaching consequences for everyone on Earth, wiping out everything from satellites to power grids. And according to a 2008 National Academy of Sciences report, this could lead to “extensive social and economic disruptions.”

“What’s at stake are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives,” Bogdan explained. One of the biggest concerns, it seems, is what might happen to global positioning systems, or GPS, in the event of such a catastrophic solar storm. After all, we depend on this technology for everything from air travel to automobile navigation.

If these systems were rendered useless, the world could quickly descend into chaos. And with satellite transmissions disrupted, even basic financial transactions could prove impossible to carry out. But, according to National Geographic, what experts really fear is the damage that a violent solar storm could do to the power grid. 

Apparently, the power surge associated with another Carrington Event could knock out large transformers  – which are not easily replaced. And if lots of them are taken down at the same time, several major U.S. cities, particularly those on the east coast, could be left without electricity for a long time.

So just how likely is it that such a disaster might occur and what are we doing to prepare? Although experts predicted that the next solar maximum – which arrived in April 2014 – might herald a devastating geomagnetic storm, no such incident materialized. Meanwhile, scientists hope that technical advancements might help them better predict such events in the future. At the moment, though, they have a lot of catching up to do. Speaking to National Geographic, Bogan’s coworker Rodney Viereck confessed, “We’re back where weather forecasters were 50 years ago.”