What If the Biggest Solar Storm Ever Hit Earth Again? (Second by Second → 1 Month Later)

[00:00:00]0 seconds. [music] On September 1st, 1859, a British astronomer named Richard Carrington watched a massive solar flare erupt [music] from the sun's surface.

[00:00:10]Within 17 hours, the resulting geomagnetic storm hit [music] Earth so hard that telegraph systems across Europe and North America failed completely. [music] Some catching fire, some continuing to transmit even after operators disconnected them from their power sources, running entirely on the current the storm [music] itself was inducing through the lines. That was before the power grid, before satellites, before [music] the internet. It's happening again, the same scale, the same trajectory, aimed directly at Earth.

[00:00:39]>> [music] >> 1 second later, the flare releases x-rays and ultraviolet radiation traveling at [music] the speed of light. They left the sun 8 minutes ago. They're already here. Behind them, moving much slower, is the real threat, a coronal mass ejection, a billion-ton cloud of magnetized plasma now racing through space at several million miles per hour.

[00:01:00]It will take 15 to 18 hours to arrive.

[00:01:03]Space weather agencies detect the eruption within seconds. The alerts go out.

[00:01:08]Grid operators in Canada, the United States, and northern Europe start receiving calls. Satellite companies begin emergency shutdown procedures.

[00:01:16]Astronauts on the International Space Station move toward the most shielded section of the station.

[00:01:21]>> [music] >> The plasma cloud is already a third of the way here. Nobody can stop it.

[00:01:26]8 minutes later, the radiation hits the sunlit side of Earth. The upper atmosphere ionizes instantly.

[00:01:32]High-frequency radio, the backbone of long-distance aviation communication, starts degrading across the entire daylight hemisphere. Pilots over the Atlantic lose reliable contact with air traffic control. [music] Emergency channels fill with static.

[00:01:47]Ships in the Pacific get nothing but noise on frequencies that were working fine 3 minutes ago.

[00:01:52]In Denver, air traffic controllers begin switching to backup frequencies. Some work, some don't. This is just the radiation. The plasma hasn't arrived yet.

[00:02:03]30 minutes later.

[00:02:05]GPS signals start drifting. The ionospheric disruption from the radiation is bending and scattering the satellite signals that positioning systems rely [music] on. In New York City, navigation apps show locations jumping by hundreds of feet.

[00:02:19]A cargo ship approaching Singapore receives [music] conflicting position data from three different systems simultaneously and slows to a crawl.

[00:02:28]Farm equipment in Iowa using satellite guided autopilot steers off course and stops. These are inconveniences right now. In a few hours, they'll be the least of anyone's problems.

[00:02:39]1 hour later.

[00:02:41]Scientists confirm what the initial readings already suggested. This is a Carrington class event. The coronal mass ejection is enormous, fast, and aimed directly at Earth's magnetic field.

[00:02:52]Impact in [music] roughly 15 hours. Grid operators across North America and Europe begin reducing load and disconnecting vulnerable equipment where they can. Airlines reroute flights away from the polar regions where the storm will hit hardest. The FAA grounds departures at several major airports as a precaution. None of these preparations are wrong. None of them are enough.

[00:03:16]15 hours after the flare, the plasma arrives.

[00:03:20]The coronal mass ejection hits Earth's magnetosphere. The magnetic field, the invisible shield that deflects solar wind constantly, every day, without [music] anyone noticing, gets slammed by a billion tons of magnetized plasma moving at over a million miles per hour.

[00:03:36]The field compresses violently on the sunlit side and stretches out behind the planet. The compression pushes the boundary of the magnetosphere down toward the surface. Charged particles that would normally be deflected pour into the upper atmosphere. What happens next happens fast.

[00:03:53]1 second after impact, the magnetic field convulses and the convulsion travels down into the ground. Rapidly changing magnetic fields induce electrical currents in anything long and conductive, the same basic physics behind every electric generator ever built.

[00:04:09]The difference is that transformers and generators are designed for this.

[00:04:14]Long-distance transmission lines, pipelines, and undersea cables are not.

[00:04:18]Across North America and Northern Europe, geomagnetically induced currents begin flowing through power infrastructure. Compass needles in affected regions spin and don't stop.

[00:04:29]Transformer cores, already running near their operational limits on a normal day, >> [music] >> begin saturating with the additional current. Warning indicators light up in grid control rooms from Manitoba to Maryland. 10 seconds after impact, the grid starts shaking. In Ontario, voltage alarms appear simultaneously across dozens of monitoring stations.

[00:04:49]>> [music] >> Operators in control rooms are watching boards that are normally green turning amber, then red, faster than they can respond.

[00:04:57]In Scandinavia, substations report currents flowing through equipment in directions the equipment wasn't designed to handle.

[00:05:04]In the northeastern United States, the first fluctuations hit the transmission lines running down from Canada.

[00:05:11]The 1989 geomagnetic storm, far smaller than this one, collapsed the Hydro-Québec grid in 92 seconds and left 6 million people without power for 9 hours.

[00:05:22]That storm damaged transformers as far away as New Jersey. This storm is significantly stronger and it's hitting a grid that has grown larger and more interconnected since 1989.

[00:05:33]More interconnected means more efficient on a normal day. Right now, it means the failure has more pathways to travel.

[00:05:40]30 seconds after impact, the sky tears open with color. Auroras, normally confined to the Arctic and Antarctic circles, are spreading toward the equator at visible speed. Green and red curtains of light appear over London.

[00:05:55]The sky above New Jersey turns a deep pulsing red. In Las Vegas, people step outside and photograph an aurora above the strip. In Miami, something that looks like a distant fire on the northern horizon is actually the atmosphere glowing from charged particle impacts at 60 mi altitude. Millions of people are staring upward. Most of them have no idea the grid is failing beneath their feet. One minute after impact.

[00:06:21]Satellites are losing control. In low Earth orbit, the atmosphere has expanded slightly from the energy input of the storm. A well-documented effect that increases drag [music] on spacecraft.

[00:06:33]Satellites that were in stable orbits are being pulled lower. Navigation systems on board are receiving contradictory data from magnetometers that are seeing a magnetic field [music] nothing like the one they were calibrated for. Some spacecraft enter safe mode automatically, shutting down non-essential systems. Others simply lose contact with their ground stations.

[00:06:54]Starlink connections drop across [music] wide regions of North America and Europe simultaneously. Weather satellites stop returning complete imagery. The handful of GPS satellites still transmitting are doing so through an ionosphere so disturbed that the signals arriving at the surface are close [music] to useless.

[00:07:11]The systems the modern world runs on are going dark one by one from the top down.

[00:07:17]Five minutes after impact. GPS is no longer reliable anywhere in the northern hemisphere.

[00:07:23]>> [music] >> Aircraft approaching Heathrow are receiving position data that conflicts with their on-board inertial navigation systems. Controllers are sequencing arrivals manually using radar returns and voice communication. The way it was done before GPS [music] existed. It works, but slowly. Container ships outside Los Angeles are holding position rather than navigating into the port without trustworthy [music] coordinates. Emergency dispatchers in Chicago are struggling to locate callers [music] accurately because the positioning data their systems depend on is jumping by blocks. Every system that assumed GPS would always be available is now finding out what happens when it isn't. [music] 30 minutes after impact.

[00:08:03]The first transformers fail.

[00:08:04]>> [music] >> Transformer cores that have been saturating with induced current for the past half hour begin overheating past their rated limits.

[00:08:12]The failures start in the highest latitude regions, northern Canada, Scandinavia, Alaska, where the geomagnetic disturbance is most intense and work their way south as the storm's [music] effects spread. Each transformer that trips offline pushes its load onto the remaining ones. The remaining ones are already stressed. The cascade accelerates. Toronto loses power district [music] by district, the outages spreading south across the city.

[00:08:37]Over about 20 minutes, Stockholm goes dark faster. [music] The Swedish grid is smaller and the failures concentrate quickly. In Boston, traffic signals fail across [music] a 12-block stretch downtown. Then the next 12 blocks.

[00:08:52]Then the skyline starts going out. 1 hour after impact.

[00:08:56]The northeastern United States and most of Canada are without power. The grid operators tried. Some sections were manually disconnected in time and can be brought back online once the storm passes. But the large high voltage transformers, [music] the equipment that steps power up for long distance transmission, are a different problem.

[00:09:16]Several dozen of them across the affected region have been damaged beyond immediate repair. These transformers are custom-built. They weigh hundreds of tons each. They take 12 to 18 months to manufacture and deliver under normal circumstances. There are no spares sitting in a warehouse. In northern Europe, the same picture. The lights are out across Scandinavia, Scotland, and significant parts of Germany and Poland.

[00:09:42]Southern Europe has partial power. The storm is weaker at lower latitudes, and some grids disconnected themselves from northern networks in time to avoid the worst of the cascade.

[00:09:53]3 hours after impact, the phones stop working. Cell towers run on grid power.

[00:09:58]Where the grid is out, towers switch to battery backup. Battery backup lasts 4 to 8 hours on most towers, longer on a few. As the batteries drain, coverage dies neighborhood by neighborhood. By mid-evening in the blacked-out regions, mobile service is gone across most of the northeastern United States and Canada. People with battery-powered radios can hear emergency broadcasts.

[00:10:20]People without them cannot reach anyone.

[00:10:22]Families separated when the power went out have no way to find each other.

[00:10:26]Hospitals are on diesel generators, those that had them and had them fueled.

[00:10:31]The ones that didn't are managing on whatever battery backup exists for critical equipment. The information blackout for millions of people is almost as disorienting as the power blackout itself.

[00:10:42]Nobody on the ground knows whether this is local, regional, or global. Nobody knows when it ends. 12 hours after impact.

[00:10:51]Transportation is freezing up. Airports in the affected region suspended departures hours ago. The ones still receiving flights are overwhelmed.

[00:11:00]Thousands of passengers stranded at JFK, O'Hare, and Heathrow sitting in terminals that are running on backup lighting and no air conditioning. Rail networks have lost signaling systems, and most trains are stopped between stations waiting for instructions that aren't coming through functioning communications.

[00:11:18]Gas stations in blacked-out areas have no power to run their pumps. The lines that formed in [music] the first hours after the outage have grown. Many stations are now empty. In cities that still have power further south or in regions that survived on isolated grids, the roads are filling with people driving away from the dark zones. The highways out of New York and Boston are gridlocked before midnight.

[00:11:42]One day later, the cities that lost power are starting to feel it in the pipes. Water treatment plants and pumping stations run on electricity. Some have backup generators. Some ran out of diesel during the night. In Manhattan, water pressure in high-rise buildings has dropped significantly. The pumps that push water above the sixth floor are on grid power, and the grid is gone.

[00:12:04]Residents on upper floors are carrying water up staircases in whatever containers they have. Hospitals in Chicago and Toronto are managing, but carefully.

[00:12:13]Elective procedures were canceled on the first day. Now surgical teams are working under emergency lighting, conserving generator power for the equipment that can't be turned off.

[00:12:23]Diesel deliveries are being prioritized to medical facilities, but the trucks making deliveries are navigating cities with no traffic signals and no GPS on roads increasingly clogged with people trying to leave. Supermarkets have been emptied. The food that was refrigerated is going bad. Nobody is restocking the shelves because the trucks aren't moving.

[00:12:45]Three days later, cell tower batteries are dead across most of the blacked-out regions. The silence is now complete. Hospitals running low on fuel begin making difficult decisions about which equipment stays on. Water pressure is gone in most of Manhattan above [music] the first few floors. People are collecting water from fire hydrants. The main pressure still works in the distribution mains, just not the building pumps. The lines at hydrants are long [music] and getting longer. In rural areas outside the major cities, the situation is different, but not better.

[00:13:16]Small towns with no grid connection to the damaged infrastructure are physically fine, but they're cut off. No information, no resupply, no way to know when or whether help is coming. The hospitals in those areas are small, the fuel depots are small, [music] the food warehouses are small. The systems designed to manage short emergencies, [music] 72-hour backup power, 3-day food reserves, emergency [music] communication networks, were built for localized disasters. A continent-wide blackout of indefinite length is a different [music] problem entirely.

[00:13:50]5 days later, supply chains are stopping, refrigerated warehouses across the blacked-out regions have lost their cold. The food inside them is gone.

[00:13:59][music] Fuel terminals can't pump without power.

[00:14:02]Trucks that were moving before the storm are now stranded wherever they ran out of diesel, which is wherever the last functioning [music] gas station was.

[00:14:10]Distribution centers that could operate are doing so, but the roads into the dark zones are increasingly difficult to navigate. Traffic signals still out, abandoned vehicles on major routes, no reliable communication [music] with anyone on the other end of the delivery.

[00:14:25]In New Jersey, supermarket shelves have been empty for 2 days. Food distribution centers run by emergency management are operating in parking lots [music] with lines stretching for blocks. In London, the situation is similar. Scotland and Northern England are still dark, >> [music] >> and the supply routes running through them have stopped. 1 week later, people are leaving the cities, not everyone and not in panic, but like a slow, steady exodus of anyone who has somewhere else to go and the means to get there. The highways out of New York, Chicago, and Toronto are moving, but slowly. Fuel is scarce. Abandoned vehicles narrow the lanes, and there's nowhere obvious to go. Small towns an hour outside the major cities are filling with people who've driven until they found somewhere with lights on.

[00:15:12]Those towns are not equipped for this.

[00:15:14]Their grocery stores, their water systems, their medical facilities, all sized for their normal populations.

[00:15:21]The math stops working fast when that population triples. Las Vegas, which runs on air conditioning and imported water, and has no local power generation of any significance, is particularly bad. Temperatures in the high desert in summer are brutal without climate control. Residents are leaving.

[00:15:39]The hotels, which have generators, are running them for as long as their fuel holds.

[00:15:45]10 days later.

[00:15:46]Power is coming back in some places.

[00:15:48]Grid operators have been working since the first hours to restore whatever they can. The sections that were manually disconnected before the transformers failed are the easiest. Close a few switches, restore the load gradually, test for stability.

[00:16:03]Parts of Washington, D.C. have power.

[00:16:05]Sections of Southern Canada, parts of France and Central Europe that were on isolated networks are mostly back to normal.

[00:16:12]The hard problem is the damaged transformers. The large high-voltage units that burned out during the storm cannot be repaired in the field. They have to be replaced. The companies that build them are taking orders now, and the lead time is 12 to 18 months per unit. The United States alone lost dozens of them. There is no stockpile.

[00:16:31]Military units are delivering generators to hospitals, water treatment plants, and fuel depots in the most affected cities. A generator can power a city block. It cannot power a city.

[00:16:43]Two weeks later.

[00:16:45]The world has split into two kinds of places, powered and [music] not. Powered regions are functioning with disruptions. Supply chains are stressed.

[00:16:53]Some goods are scarce. GPS is still partially degraded, and satellite internet is patchy because a significant fraction of the low orbit constellation is still in safe mode or drifting. But, the lights are on, the water runs, and the food is mostly there. Unpowered regions are a different world. Northern Canada, Scandinavia, Scotland, and major sections of the American Northeast are still operating on whatever generators exist, and the generator fuel is the constant crisis.

[00:17:23]Communities with local hydroelectric generation or small isolated grids powered by regional resources have become the anchor points around which recovery is organizing. People are moving toward them. A town in Vermont with a working hydroelectric plant on a local river has become home to four times its normal population. The plant produces enough power for the original town, but it produces for four times that is a daily negotiation.

[00:17:48]Three weeks later.

[00:17:50]Banks are the quiet crisis nobody was prepared for. The financial system runs on computers, and computers run on power. It also runs on precise GPS timing signals used to synchronize transactions across networks, signals that are still degraded. In the powered regions, banking is mostly functional if slower. In the dark zones, it has been cash only since the first day. Cash that most people didn't have much of because nobody carries anymore. The ports are a different problem. Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Singapore are physically operational, but the shipping networks feeding them are disrupted. Vessels that were navigating with GPS are now moving more cautiously and slowly. Fuel is harder to source in affected regions, and the insurance markets for transoceanic shipping have seized up while the scale of the damage is still being assessed. Containers are piling up at the functioning ports faster than they can be moved inland. Factories waiting on components are idle.

[00:18:49]One month later.

[00:18:50]Some cities have power for part of the day. Rotating blackouts, a few hours on, a few hours off, are being managed by grid operators trying to balance demand against the reduced supply from a partially destroyed transmission network. New York gets 6 hours, then darkness, then 6 more.

[00:19:07]The damaged satellites are a longer-term problem. Some have been recovered from safe mode. Others drifted enough during the storm to require orbital corrections that use more fuel than was budgeted.

[00:19:19]Several were lost entirely. The GPS constellation is operating at reduced capacity and may stay that way for months while replacement launches are prepared.

[00:19:29]The aurora is still occasionally visible from mid-latitude cities as secondary waves of solar activity keep arriving.

[00:19:36]People stop and look at it. It's still beautiful. It doesn't feel the same as it did on the first night. A month in, most people in the affected regions are alive.

[00:19:47]The deaths that happened were not from the storm directly. They were from hospitals that lost power at the wrong moment, from medication that required refrigeration and didn't survive, from accidents on roads with no signals, from the dozens of ways a modern city can quietly stop keeping people alive when the electricity goes out.

[00:20:06]The storm lasted about 48 hours. The darkness it created is measured differently depending on where you are.

[00:20:13]Days in some places, months in others, and for the regions waiting on transformer replacements that are 12 months away from the factory floor, something closer to years.