While space seems like a very distant worry for most of us, there are plenty of people that spend their lives thinking about it and worrying about the impact that phenomena that happens thousands of light years away has on Earth. One of the events that could impact Earth in an almost unimaginable way is a solar superstorm.
These solar superstorms have happened before to various degrees of intensity, but the one that scientists are worried about would be powerful enough to knock out the internet, shut down satellites, and cut off access to clean water and with very little warning.
Thankfully, events of this magnitude are quite rare, in fact the last one took place over a thousand years ago, but this could easily mean we are due and we should be prepared. As an upside, the whole globe would be able to see the Northern Lights, which would not make up for all the unexpected deaths and chaos.
These solar superstorms are known as Miyake storms, in honor of a PhD student called Fusa Miyake who, in 2012 noticed a strange spike in carbon-14 in ancient cedar trees in Japan. That spike, traced back to the year 774 CE, hinted at a major burst of solar particles hitting Earth and was named after her.
How a solar superstorm could affect Earth
Mathew Owens, Professor of Space Physics at the University of Reading, told MailOnline how another Miyake event could cause havoc on Earth. “It’s exciting if you’re a space physicist but worrying if you’re a power grid operator. If we got something like Miyake again, we’d be looking at a lot of power outages as transformers would be burned out. If you imagine that on a large scale, that becomes really worrying. It’s then very difficult to get the grid back online because these transformers take months to build and install. If you lose power, you lose internet and you lose even more basic things like clean water because the pumps need power to run and sanitation needs electricity. Even all our food would be affected, as we rely on refrigeration for more of our food now. So getting access to food and water becomes quite difficult if you lose power for a significant amount of time.”
And the worst part is that there would only be a small window of time as a warning, about 18 hours before the infrastructure collapsed. The last big solar storm to really mess with us was the Carrington Event in 1859. That one sparked auroras even in tropical areas and messed with telegraph systems, people got shocked and papers caught fire. A Miyake-level event would be at least ten times more intense than that.
The Carrington Event was scary, but according to Professor Owens “The level of radiation from the Carrington event would have been the equivalent of receiving a few chest X-rays. You’d avoid that if you could, but it’s not the end of the world for you.”
The impact that a Miyake event would have on humans and animals is unknown, but researchers from the University of Queensland gave it a try in a 2022 study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A “If a Miyake event were to occur today, the sudden and dramatic rise in cosmic radiation could be devastating to the biosphere and technological society. It is therefore concerning that we have little understanding of how to predict their occurrence or effects. A solar proton event orders of magnitude more powerful than any previously observed could cause an ‘internet apocalypse’ of prolonged outages by damaging submarine cables and satellites. The direct effects of energetic particles could even harm the health of passengers in high-altitude aircraft. It is also likely that the 774 CE event would have caused an approximately 8.5 per cent depletion in global ozone coverage, with a significant but not catastrophic effect on weather. The origin and physics of these radiocarbon spikes are therefore important not just for astronomers and archaeologists, but for risk planning and mitigation in general society.’