Think pandemics are bad? Prepare for the main event

A massive solar storm would have the power to paralyse modern life. No wonder scientists are worried.

The Earth as seen from space in the grip of a solar storm in 2003. Picture: International Space Station NASA science officer Don Pettit

Standing beneath the skies of England’s Nottinghamshire, one Times letter writer said that it was as if night had turned to day. In Preston, another correspondent spoke of “luminous waves” that “rolled up in quick succession” – bright enough to cast an eerie and flickering shadow.

Twelve hours later, on the other side of the world, an Australian miner was yet more poetic about what, for him, were the Southern Lights.

“A scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself,” he said, recalling that night in September 1859. “Lights of every imaginable colour were issuing from the southern heavens, one colour fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last.”

It was, he said – and he was almost certainly right – the greatest aurora ever recorded.

There were other oddities that night and in the day that came after. In some telegraph stations, signals failed to send. In others, communications continued despite the fact the power was disconnected. In still more, sudden jolts and sparks set the paper used to record messages on fire.

But, for the world, that was it. Although few knew it, several billion tonnes of plasma, thrown off by the angry sun, had just whizzed past our planet – a planet that was, just, on the cusp of the electronics age.

For a long time, the events of September 1859 were remembered as a spectacular light show, bringing the ethereal beauty of the poles to those on lower latitudes. In recent years the solar eruption, now known as the Carrington Event after the astronomer who determined its cause, has taken on a different significance.

This NASA image shows the Sun unleashing a medium-sized solar flare, a minor radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection on in 2011.

These days, the Carrington Event is referenced on national risk registers. When people in the heart of Whitehall gather to discuss the events that put our very society at risk, they consider the night the poles shone red, and the telegraphs sparked. In 2015 the events of that Victorian night were transposed on to the modern world and considered in depth by a British government advisory group, then obscure, known as Sage.

In a world connected by more than just the telegraph, in which satellites crisscross the sky, in which ATMs rely on the signals they send and electricity cables span whole continents, a solar storm is not just an astronomical wonder. It is, in the estimation of some experts at least, a threat.

Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, is one of those who takes it very seriously indeed. “The possible consequences are immense,” he says. His concern is that if a really big solar storm hits, the things that make the modern world modern – electricity, communications – will simply cease to work. “Anything which is not shielded, anything which cannot deal with sudden current fluctuations, could be damaged and potentially put out of service.”

In the morning, you will arrive down to breakfast and ask Alexa the weather – but she won’t reply. You will flick first to digital radio, then FM and there will be nothing. You will call a friend but your phone will be down. You will check the internet, but there will be no internet. Finally, in desperation, you will get in your car and its satnav won’t know where it is – because the satellite providing it may not even be there.

“There could be trillions of pounds of immediate damage, and knock-on effects,” says Professor Kelman. “In the extreme case, we don’t know how bad it could get. It is possible most satellites get knocked out or their communications are severely disrupted, as well as all electronics on the ground.”

The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, near the city of Tromsoe, northern Norway, in 2012. Stargazers were out in force in northern Europe, hoping to be awed by a spectacular showing of northern lights after the most powerful solar storm in six years.

This is the kind of natural disaster that science journalists like to write about and Professor Kelman – who it is fair to say sits on the more pessimistic side of the scale of solar storm-watchers – is the kind of expert we like to interview about it.

Every year, a study crops up about extreme space weather. There will be a warning from a scientist, or a new attempt to predict the sun’s behaviour.

Each time it is covered by the national media and readers are reminded of our civilisation’s fragility, of the awesome power of an indifferent universe. Then after reading the warning, they and the journalists return to their lives, considering it just another would-be calamity that isn’t going to happen.

Until now, perhaps. Because, today, there is cause to re-evaluate that assessment. Solar storms are not the only story that fits in this genre. There used to be another: global pandemics.

There is a plan. There are warnings. On the national risk register, jostling for position with emerging infectious diseases and biological weapons attacks, there is a section on mitigating the effects of space weather.

Professor Kelman represents one strand of opinion. There is another that considers his view scaremongering. Officials are confident that partly through good sense and partly through luck the UK is one of the best prepared countries in the world for a repeat of the Carrington Event. That assurance, though, is perhaps less comforting now than it might have been six months ago.

“Given how long we prepared for pandemics, and yet found we still weren’t ready to make the decision between different types of lockdowns, it is concerning to me,” Professor Kelman says.

There are many ways that civilisation could end. A supervolcano could consume the west coast of the US, then spew ash across the planet. A supernova could explode and sterilise the planet. A good old-fashioned comet could take out most life.

Solar storms are not like this – they are not nuclear war or cometary apocalypse. Humans survive them just fine, it’s our electronic infrastructure that is in jeopardy. Like a mildly deadly pandemic, solar storms are, at the absolute worst, civilisation-stoppers, not civilisation-enders.

Also like a mildly deadly pandemic, there are some scientists who think we have all the contingencies we need in place, that we have shielded key infrastructure already. Small solar storms have knocked out major transformers in the past, notably in Canada and South Africa, but the UK’s National Grid has, it believes, more extra capacity than that of most countries.

Fears of a nationwide blackout, like that depicted in a recent Sky drama about solar storms, are, they say, overblown. Indeed, the National Grid even wrote a blogpost calling the program a “(solar) storm in a teacup”.

Without any modern precedent for dealing with such a storm, though, there are other scientists who are a bit less sure. And the world is worried enough, at least in some quarters, that it has already spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to be better prepared.

As you read this, there is a small craft circling the sun, like a tiny mosquito around a massive flame. On its sun-facing side, temperatures reach 500C. On its space-facing side, they are -180C. Here, a mere 77 million kilometres from the centre of our solar system, the joint Nasa-Esa Solar Orbiter is peering into the maelstrom of superheated gas that marks the surface of the sun.

In this soup of particles, conventional chemistry breaks down. Atoms are shorn of their electrons. Others fuse to make new nuclei. And sometimes, as happened in 1859, a great mass of magnetised plasma erupts into the space beyond. How this happens is not clear – and understanding it is a key part of the this solar orbiter’s mission.

That solar storms happen regularly, and sometimes do so at the scale of Carrington Event, is not in dispute. We know this not because of sophisticated understanding of the sun, but because we have seen it. When the sun blasts out a great glob of magnetic plasma, it does so asymmetrically. Like a slingshot, these coronal mass ejections spring out from the rotating sun on a fixed trajectory. That means you have to be unlucky; it has to be flung at just your bit of space.

In 1859, a glob hit us square on. In 2012, we watched a similar eruption whizz past – completely harmless.

There is, astronomers believe, roughly a 1 per cent chance per year of another Carrington Event hitting us – a 1 per cent chance of a solar storm that in the 19th century set telegraph stations on fire and allowed others to transmit without power. In the 21st century, where the vast majority of humans rely on sophisticated handheld electronics connected in an intricate web both to each other and to satellites above, what could it do? This is where the experts differ.

First to arrive will be the X-rays. Travelling at the speed of light, they will reach us in eight minutes – a sudden blast of radiation that interrupts high-frequency communications of the kind used on transoceanic sailing routes. In the middle of the Pacific, many boats will be – as they used to be – completely on their own. An hour later, at a significant fraction of light speed, come the charged particles.

In the upper atmosphere, they will produce spectacular aurora, but they will also leave behind a trail of destruction, after bombarding the electronics of satellites. Some satellites may be lost, others may become unreliable. Travelling below, aeroplanes, ships – not to mention anyone using a satnav – may find they can no longer rely on their GPS. People on their way to work will jab uselessly at Google Maps.

There will be more counterintuitive casualties too. Navigation satellites do not only provide positional information, they are also a timing signal. A web of interconnected services, from financial markets to credit cards to internet routers to mobile phones could start to fail. Forget about sending civilisation back 100 years – we could, briefly, return to a barter economy.

There are, it should be noted, a lot of “coulds” in this scenario; in the complexity of globalisation, where one system relies on a network of others, we are entering the unknown.

This will be merely a prelude. In as little as a day, and as much as four days, the slower-moving coronal mass ejection will arrive. This is the time period that interests Professor Kelman. After we know it’s coming, and before it hits, when the airwaves are filled – perhaps their last few hours – with people like him offering predictions for what comes next, how will people react?

“What are we going to be doing in that time? If we suddenly had three days’ notice that all of the information and communication technologies are going to go down – that credit cards, debit cards, ATM machines, mobile phones are going to go down, what happens? With the pandemic we’ve seen that even without supply chains disrupted people fight over toilet paper,” he says.

Even now, disaster will not be assured. As the world waits on the arrival, stockpiling loo roll and sourdough starters, it also awaits a coin toss. Half the time, the magnetic field of the plasma will be oriented in the same direction as the Earth’s – and pass harmlessly by. Half the time it will not.

Minutes before impact, this speeding magnetic mass will pass a spacecraft drifting in the Lagrange point – the place where the Earth’s gravity cancels out the sun’s. This spacecraft, sent up in part for this eventuality, is shielded to weather the worst that space offers. As the worst that space offers rushes past, buffeting it at thousands of kilometres a second, the craft will send its own signal at 300,000km a second, informing controllers on Earth of the plasma’s polarity.

Finally, if we have lost the coin toss, the coronal mass ejection will batter into and temporarily neutralise our own magnetic field.

“It streams past the Earth, then snaps back in,” says Andrew Richards, who has been modelling the ramifications of a solar storm for the National Grid. Our own magnetic field is squeezed, squashed and oscillated. “It’s a bit like ringing a bell on the magnetic field.”

If satellites did survive the first bombardment, their communications will now become completely unreliable until the storm abates. The Royal Academy of Engineering estimates that GPS could be down for three days. In the turmoil, the atmosphere expands. Satellites in low-earth orbit will hit more resistance and slow, perhaps even spiralling into Earth. The troubles will not stop there.

On the surface of the Earth, this resonating magnetic field will induce a current. In the worst-case scenario this current will travel up the high voltage wires of our electricity grid until it reaches a transformer and will fry it.

As a peer and the astronomer royal, Lord Rees of Ludlow has been part of the discussions about preparing for space weather, but also about protecting the grid in general. In the event a blackout was caused by something the US could retaliate against – not, that is, a star – he has no doubt they would. “To give you an idea of how seriously this is taken, the US considers a cyber-attack on the electricity grid so severe as to merit a nuclear response,” he says. “Lights going out are the least of the problems. They expect anarchy in a few days.”

It is tempting to think that a power outage would be heartwarming and bonding. Restaurants will get out candles, Londoners will talk to each other and cities will be briefly romantic. Governments don’t see it that way. “In the UK in the 1970s the big worry was the IRA might bomb substations around London,” Lord Rees says. “They knew it would take months to replace. The government was really terrified.”

The National Grid has a plan, called Black Start, to reboot the electricity network after a catastrophic failure. Dr Richards hopes it will not be necessary. He thinks that whatever else goes down, in Britain the grid should hold out – with localised blackouts, perhaps, but no nationwide failure.

“We’ve got a lucky legacy of a highly interconnected system, with lots and lots of lines. It looks much like a sort of spider web,” he says. When he and his colleagues get the warning of a storm, they have a plan to open up as many power lines as possible, and switch on as much high-voltage equipment as they can, to drain the current – like Thames Water flooding water meadows ahead of a storm.

“These extra lines give you much more stability. Just from an economic point of view, you wouldn’t design it that way, but it’s a historical legacy that is working in our favour.”

Other countries, with less ad hoc systems, may not fare so well. In the US, where wires stretch in long lines along the coasts, Dr Richards’s counterparts think that the system is more vulnerable. Some experts are seriously considering whether or not transformers should simply be switched off and isolated for the duration of the storm: accepting a sudden temporary blackout to prevent a permanent one.

Even if Britain’s grid survives, just a small proportion of transformers going down globally could – when coupled with the satellite losses – plunge the world into a deep recession.

A few days after the first X-rays arrived, the storm would be over. The hope is that so too would be its effects. It is possible to design satellite systems and power grids so that a Carrington Event is a temporary inconvenience, rather than a longer-term catastrophe. But, then, as several experts pointed out to The Times, it’s also possible to design a world that responds quickly and efficiently to new infectious diseases.

“I think what we learnt from the pandemic is that it would in retrospect have been worth spending a huge amount in preparation,” says Lord Rees.

Professor Kelman agrees, and also contends that readying ourselves for a solar storm would never be money wasted. “Even if we do not get a major space weather event for another century, the preparedness will help us with other disasters such as localised flooding,” he says. “The real challenge with the space weather is basically the power outage and communications outage. That has happened for so many other reasons, not involving the sun.”

He is sceptical that we really are ready for another Carrington Event, and certainly not for something worse. “When you ask how prepared are we, the correct answer is, ‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’”

One hundred and sixty one years ago, as that Australian miner gazed at the dancing lights in the sky, he rhapsodised about its meaning, writing: “The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect.”

He noted, though, in passing that there was another group who felt differently. “The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings,” he scoffed, “and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon.” There are, once again, dire forebodings. Whether they are merely superstitious fanaticism we won’t know, until the sun decides to belch in our direction.

The Times