A group of astronauts are stranded in space after a solar storm wipes out the internet. The internet could be knocked out by a solar storm. What is the likelihood of that happening?
Mathew Owens, a solar physicist at the University of Reading in the UK, told Live Science that it would take a giant solar storm. Owens said that it's not impossible to do that. It is more likely that power grids are knocked out. This phenomenon has already taken place on a small scale.
Solar storms are when the sun releases a burst of radiation. Waves of energy travel outward and impact other bodies in the solar system. There are a couple of effects when the waves interact with the magnetic field.
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Owens said that they cause electric currents to flow in Earth's upper atmosphere, heating the air just like how your electric blanket works. Magnetic storms can cause beautiful Auroras to appear over polar regions, but they can also cause problems. As the atmosphere warms, it puffs up, adding drag to satellites in low Earth orbit and knocking smaller pieces of space debris off course.
The impact of space weather on the ground is more pronounced. Powerful electric currents that flow through our planet's upper atmosphere cause powerful currents that flow through the crust. Power grids are the network of transmission lines that carry electricity from generating stations to homes and buildings and can be interfered with. According to NASA, one such event occurred in Quebec in 1989 and resulted in a 12-hour power failure. According to Live Science, 40 Starlink satellites were knocked out by a solar flare.
It's not enough to take out a few Starlink satellites. In order to take down the internet completely, a solar storm would have to interfere with the long fiber-optic cables that connect the continents. Every 30 to 90 miles (50 to 145 kilometers), these cables are equipped with repeaters that increase their signal as it travels. The cables are not vulnerable to storms like the one that hit the US. It could be enough to take down the entire cable and cause an internet apocalypse if enough cables went offline.
Everything from the supply chain to the medical system to the stock market could be disrupted by a global internet black out.
The internet can be protected against the next solar storm. The first thing to do is to shore up power grids, satellites and undersea cables so that they don't get overwhelmed by the influx of current.
The second way is to find a better way to predict solar storms.
Predicting solar storms is a difficult task. They can be hard to pin down. The technology that is affected by space weather has been around for a long time.
Current technology can predict solar storms up to two days in advance based on the activity of sunspots and black patches on the sun's surface. The way scientists follow hurricanes is not possible. The sun's current solar cycle is one of the clues they use. The European Space Agency and NASA are researching ways to make forecasts using historical data and more recent observations.
The sun's next peak of activity, known as the solar maximum, is expected to be around 25 years from now. Scientists suspect that our sun may be in a period of lower activity after recent solar maximums were relatively mild. Since the 90s, the sun has been quiet. The last worldwide geomagnetic storm took place in 1859, and it was called the Carrington event. It's possible that the internet would have been disrupted.
Hopefully, scientists will be able to find a way to minimize the impact of the next Carrington event before we end up without internet.
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