Kind of self explanatory in the title, but yeah, I’ve been curious about this ever since I read about the Carrington Event and how it would effect us in modern times.
In: Planetary Science
We would have some advanced warning of the event, as the charged particles would need time to travel through space from the sun to Earth. We have monitors looking at the sun that would log such an event, and critical infrastructure could theoretically be shut down during that solar event.
However even with that, the impacts and disruption would be devistating. Food supplies, non-government communication, transportation, power supply and medical care would all be disrupted. Realistically, outages and economic problems would last months or years, and governments would almost certainly need to enforce martial law to prevent large scale rioting.
Preppers might have some….interesting ideas but being prepared for an emergency isn’t one of them. Do you have food supplies at home to last you a month? Water purification if the water grid shuts down for some reason? If not, you might want to think about having that sort of thing.
https://www.ready.gov/kit
Nobody is 100% certain. Also it would depend massively on which side of the planet is facing the sun when the flare reaches us. Luckiest possible scenario would be something like noon in Hawaii, but even then the effects would be widespread.
Best guess is something like the following. First, we would probably have a few hours warning before the main effects reach the planet. This would be enough time to scram power plants, disconnect major substations, etc. Electrical grids around the world would be shut down as rapidly as possible. Inevitably, the vast majority of smaller substations would remain connected, which would lead to some problems later.
Most telecommunications backbone is fiber at this point. There’s some legacy copper here and there which would cause some problems but, by and large, the fabric of the internet would be fine (albeit unpowered). It is, at this point, worth remembering the old chestnut about how the original DARPANet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. A repeat of the Carrington Event would be much like a global nuclear airburst, so a lot of the same EMP-related principles apply.
Almost all satellites would suffer massive damage. We really don’t know how bad this would be, but “bad” is a very safe bet. Some satellites (particularly more recent military hardware) are hardened against this type of EM flux, but most are not. It’s a safe bet that GPS and its clones are knocked offline. Starlink is very unlikely to survive. Weather data, climate studies, etc. All of that would be bad. Oh also any astronauts on the ISS would immediately leverage the emergency escape craft to return to the surface, and we would have to go pick them up quickly before our ground infrastructure crashes.
Once the flare reaches the planet, the worst of the impacts would be on the power grid. Even with most potentials large disconnected and grounded, the massive amount of conductive wiring stringing around developed countries would act like an array of giant antennas, capturing the flux and magnifying its potential. Any transformers or other equipment not isolated from transit infrastructure would probably just explode, with the obvious consequences. The uncountably numerous small transformers which dot every neighborhood of every settled area of the developed world would *likely* see flux in-excess of their rated maxima, which means *they* probably mostly explode or at least are damaged beyond repair. Massive manufacturing backlogs would rapidly become the bottleneck for re-energizing major swathes of the grid, particularly in the mid-sized substations that are both hard to manufacture and replace, but also too numerous to have all been protected prior to the event. Take a look at some of the challenges Ukraine has faced in sourcing its grid-scale replacement components in large quantity after Russian attacks.
Cell networks would be a priority but, without grid power they would only last a few hours. True antennas and radio towers would probably do just fine, since they’re designed to withstand much more significant potentials during thunderstorms, and they wouldn’t be gathering quite as much current from a flare.
The only grid infrastructure to survive (apart from the aforementioned physically disconnected pieces scrammed prior to the event) would be that which is buried. There’s not a small amount of this, particularly in cities, but it’s still the vanishing minority of the whole. This likely means that, post-apocalypse, dense urban areas would be the first to see power restored. It would still probably take weeks to gently massage the grid back online. Parts of developed countries would likely remain without power for months, with the predictable consequences of lots of moaning and complaining. Cell networks would be restored very quickly, likely using generators.
Over years and decades, some of the destroyed near-space infrastructure would be restored, notably GPS. Given its technical and political problems, the ISS might simply be abandoned. The learnings from the flare would inform the design of future satellites and spacecraft, to say nothing of grid operating procedures.
Total economic price tag would be in the trillions, mostly in lost productivity, but it’s hard to say for sure. Imagine most wealthy countries engaging in significant economic stimulus to blunt the impact (think: what happened in 2020).
For the most part it will knock out the power grid and anything connected to it, and it could take decades to recover from it.
You can protect a lot of your electronics by just disconnecting them from the power grid, so flipping the breakers in your house for that week. But a large coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event would wreck havoc on the power grid’s infrastructure. Basically when you move a magnet near a wire it will produce a current in that wire because of a change in magnetic fields, now you can think of the power grids as a large coil of wire the Carrington event will bend the earths magnetic field enough that it will cause a very large current to be induced in the power grid which will fry most anything connected to it, like transformers.
In America we have enough residential transformers to get some stuff back up and running definitelynot all or even close to a quarter but some, however for larger transformers like at step down stations (substations) those we have some replacements and some mobile transformers that could fill the gap but not enough to cover everyone in a mass event like this. Not only that but generators which are essentially a type of transformer will also break if connected to the power grid.
So now we have no way of generating power and no way of transmitting that power. The big things to get back up and running are going to be industry and power generation, this way we can make the infrastructure we need to fix the power grid but this will take a long time, essentially this will be like boot strapping industry again.
Now then how to protect against this. One of the best ways to protect against this is going to be making the grid more distributed, solar panels for residential houses, residential and rural wind turbines, small hydro, and gas/diesel generators. As long as they are not connected to the grid during the event they should survive, this will allow for small areas where there is power, and they could supplement power to the grid to help for bootstrapping.
Now hopefully we will have enough notice for the relevant agencies to react to atleast save the generators and power plants, and even some of the substations, but usually this will amount to a few days of notice for coronal mass ejections and in the mean time important areas of the economy will lose power, like hospitals, water, and of course power.
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