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So that's why every electronic at home was all screwy
across two hemispheres
Is there any point to this distinction? Why not just say "the entire planet"?
It was hitting the Americas and the Pacific. And both hemispheres, so north and south alike. That's because that side of the Earth was facing the sun at that time. I assume the south received the brunt of it due to the axial tilt going into southern summer.
So it was not the entire planet, just the two hemispheres of North and South and specifically mostly the Americas and the Pacific.
So it was only one hemisphere, but instead of being clear and specifying actual locations, the vague description suggests the whole planet was affected. How unhelpful.
The two hemispheres are the northern and southern hemispheres when discussing earth, and both were affected.
Across 4 quadrispheres
Across the mono-unisphere
Across a 100-dimensional non-Gaussian hypersphere
Unicron?
A part of me dreads what would happen if another carrington event happened and another part of me eagerly wants to see what would happen.
I've read that if things are off and not powered that they wouldn't be affected. You could kill the power to your house and shut off battery powered items and be okay.
Maybe I'm wrong though. Also, I've read the sun is monitored for such things we would have 10 minutes or so of time to prepare.
we would have 10 minutes or so of time to prepare
More like a couple of days. Coronal mass ejections (which is what the Carrington event was) can be seen leaving the sun, there's good software to track and predict their trajectories and how much they dissipate (or don't) en route.
No CME has an arrival time on the order of 10 mnutes.
That makes sense considering light takes 8 minutes.
This is a case of 'it depends '. The damage isn't caused by something being on or off. It's everywhere. Disconnecting can isolate damage from small storms, but world ending storms have enough energy to jump air gaps and the surges would be faster than most breakers can react to. You'd physically have to rip the cables from your house to be safe. Smaller, battery powered devices would be more susceptible regardless if they were on/off. Batteries are a concern because you don't want them to incur damage/blow up due to an electric surge.
If this sounds overblown remember that during the Carrington Event, telegraph lines continued to operate for hours even after batteries were removed. In some cases, lines sparked and damaged equipment or personnel. These are very powerful storms that naturally induce electric current in circuitry.
before Musk fired everyone.
The ESA also monitors space weather.
Along with NOAA SWPC (which is a target in Trump's war on science), the UK Met Office and a Chinese government agency have 24/7 human-staffed space weather ops centers.
ESA monitoring by human forecasters, to the best of my knowledge, isn't 24/7-- but the satellite feeds are.
Right? I'm not a prepper, but I find it's a lof of fun to plan for this kind of thing. I never actually do, prepare anything, but I make mental notes. Right now the plan would be to get a Faraday cage, shove a microwave motor in there as AFAIK they can be great as generators, then a RPi, a tiny monitor and a downloaded copy of Wikipedia. I'd love to get some Lora devices so that I can give them to friends and family
Pretty sure there are prepper packages available online that is a superset of knowledge bases, things like wikipedia, music, survival guides, guides on agriculture/raw material processing/ hunting / basic engineering etc. (The free ones are better than for-pay grifter packets) precisely for things like this.
I'm not sure how well a faraday cage would protect against something like this. Maybe a lot maybe not as much as you'd think.
Total em shielding would probably be a better option.
I’m not sure how well a faraday cage would protect against something like this. Maybe a lot maybe not as much as you’d think.
Very effectively.
The Carrington event was caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME), not a solar flare.
A coronal mass ejection is a cloud of charged particles (plasma) emitted by the sun. When it hits the earth, it induces a voltage in the earth's magnetic field. North-south, there's no voltage differential to speak of because that's the orientation of the magnetic field's lines of force. But on an east-west axis, there can be a large voltage differential. So if there's a big-ass conductor oriented on an east-west axis (like the transcontinental copper telegraph lines at the time of the Carrington event), that conductor can carry a high voltage until it is discharged. The magnitude of that voltage is proportional to the east-west vector component of the length of the conductor.
So, if a huge CME leaves the sun and is forecast to hit the earth, grid operators have 18 hours to a couple of days to decouple their grids along the east-west axis. 1/4 the length, 1/4 the induced voltage. That can make a big difference. And they know how to do that and have done it before.
A lot of the freaking out about CMEs is based on cunfusion CME impacts with the effects of electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) which are superficially similar phenomena with different (manmade) causes. But CMEs are huge, diffuse, and not ultra-fast-moving, so they don't hit like a spike as EMPs do, they hit more like an extended gust of wind, and the induced voltage doesn't grow in microseconds, it grows over hours. So worrying about what'd happen to disconnected home electronics in the event of a CME is silly.
There might be other problems, though, besides the grid induced voltage I've already mentioned. Satellites can accumulate static charge and malfunction, so you might lose GPS and some satellite-based communications paths. The earth's ionosphere might be disrupted, interfering with HF radio communications and with radio communication that relies on ionospheric skips. But those are the biggest impacts.
And if there's an EMP, it's likely that's because someone set off a nuke, so the loss of your game controller is going to be one of the least of your worries.
Cool to know, thanks for taking the time to type that out!
I've got my foil hat on.
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Is that why cell phone connections have been so weak lately?
Radio is affected by solar activity because many radio frequencies, especially those used by long-distance or shortwave radio, depend on the Earth's ionosphere for reflection, which is disrupted by solar flares. Cellular phones, however, use higher frequency bands (UHFVHF) that are not reflected by the ionosphere; instead, they transmit via a line-of-sight connection between the phone and a cell tower, making them much less susceptible to solar interference.
Our phones really use uhf/vhf? Dang. I'm a ham nerd but my radio knowledge doesn't really extend beyond those bands.
Mmmm, hammmm
Mobile phones use UHF and SHF, where GSM is on the lower end of the spectrum (900/1800MHz) and 5G on the higher end. The newest WiFi standard is at 6GHz.
5G can go as high as 71GHz, just not in mobile phones yet
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Wish it would knock me out instead
I'll do it for 10 bucks
Deal. I await your strongest solar flare.
Did we know this was coming or was it a surprise?
It's impossible to predict specific solar flares. They're correlated with sunspots, but not closely enough to tell us anything specific and actionable, and as Gates9 mentioned downthread, we're near solar maximum, so the sun's at a rolling boil right now.
And, as Gates9 also mentioned, we know shockingly little about the sun. There are some good magnetohydrodynamic models of solar lines of flux in the corona and their relationship to sunspots and flares, but it's still early days. As to what's up in the interior of the sun, we have some grossly macro-level physical theories, but that's about it. And even with the corona, there's no credible explanation of something as basic as why it's so damn hot.
We are in “solar maximum” so heightened activity is expected but we are also not very far in our study and understanding of the sun, and “X-class flares” are fairly unusual.
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Given this timeline, no, not a surprise
It hit us like a sudden monsoon in Goa.
I'm cool with more aurora borealis. I was only able to see a dull red glow during the last solar storm.
Flares don't cause auroras. However, they are sometimes (often?) accompanied by coronal mass ejections which, if they head our way, can cause auroras. So it all depends on whether or not there were CMEs with these flares and whether or not those CMEs are on a path that will strike Earth. This forecast differs from the one in the posted article.
As it happens, there are a few CMEs headed our way right now according to spaceweather.com .
STRONG GEOMAGNETIC STORM PREDICTED: The sun hurled another CME toward Earth today, and this one looks like it will be a direct hit. The M7.5-class explosion from sunspot 4274 has an unambiguous Earth-directed component. In total, three CMEs will graze or hit Earth in the days ahead: #1, #2, #3. As a result, strong G3-class geomagnetic storms are possible on Nov. 6-8. CME impact alerts: SMS Text.
Just for reference: G3s aren't that huge, and hit the earth frequently. And a grazing, rather than a direct hit, won't do much. What we don't know when we first see them is how diffuse those CMEs are going to be when they hit us. Most CMEs spread out after they leave the sun, sometimes to such an extent that their impact on earth isn't significant. The forecasting centers monitor how CMEs develop en route to the earth, so if you're interested, keep checking their forecasts.
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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