Robin Andrews reports that if solar magnetic storms are powerful enough, such storms can induce strong electric currents in very long conducting structures in power grids, which causes serious and sometimes permanent damage to them. This can trigger widespread blackouts; a 1989 geomagnetic storm led to lights going out all over Quebec. During the Vietnam War, extreme space weather appeared to cause sea mines offshore from Vietnam to explode.
One of the strongest largest geomagnetic storms on record, the 1859 Carrington Event, disrupted telegraph systems, and its operators got electric shocks. The storm sparked auroras as far south as Hawaii, and people found that they could read newspapers outside even at night. If a similar event happened today, it would very likely cause widespread and extremely costly devastation to our increasingly electrified infrastructure.
Supercharging a Solar Storm
On a regional scale, the underlying geological makeup can have a hugely significant influence on a storm’s damage potential. Sedimentary rocks tend to have pore space that contains water, which makes them electrically conductive, says Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist with the British Geological Survey. Metamorphic and igneous rocks are denser and less porous and so are more electrically resistive. But during a geomagnetic storm, errant magnetic activity induces electrical currents at the planet’s surface that can mean trouble for a city built on top of metamorphic or igneous rock. Although the current can’t easily flow through these rocks, “if you’ve short-circuited the insulating part of the earth with a power grid, it flows right through it,” causing damage, Love says. This means when the next major geomagnetic storm strikes, “one power grid in one part of Europe might be perfectly fine, but another just a few hundred kilometers away might be seriously impacted by the same event,” says Juha-Pekka Luntama, head of the space weather for the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness Programme.
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