Just a Minor Sun Explosion

There's something scratching around out there, but how can we tell whether it should worry us? I think the simplest test is whether the sun has done anything like it since.

20 years after Carrington, Thomas Edison, light bulb.

20 years after that, turn of the century, movie theaters, electric streetcars, thousands of power plants around the country.

20 years after that, there it is.

In 1921, a railroad control tower in New York City burst into flames.

Telegraphs across half the world went haywire.

20 years after that.

In World War II, radios filled with white noise and haunting otherworldly whispers.

Troops suspected an enemy SIOP.

Then there was the Cold War nuclear scare.

The early ballistic missile warning system went on the fritz, and they thought that might have been Russia jamming the signals.

This is Elizabeth Butler, an astrophysicist who works for the federal government.

During Vietnam, she says, another solar storm triggered another military alarm.

An entire swath of sea mines off the coast of Vietnam detonated.

So, yeah, the sun kept doing it.

But the damage looked more like a nuisance than a nightmare.

We're talking sparks at a railroad tower.

If we were running the doom meter on this threat now...

It maybe sounds spooky, whatever that is, but not existential.

Solar storms have kept happening, but could it be that the wires now carrying our air conditioning iPhones and everything else are just better, better protected from the sun's coughs? Well, 1989, 140 years after Carrington, Londoners called their royal observatory with concern.

Why was the sky red? People in Florida and Cuba walked outside because they could see aurora, usually reserved for the deep north of the world.

Satellites glitched.

GPS glitched.

You had the entire Western Hemisphere radio communications disrupted.

In Montreal, Canada, the temperature was barely above zero, and the electrical current from this geomagnetic storm surged into the region's power grid.