The Carrington Geomagnetic Superstorm of 1859 | Episode 105

I do love a story where almost no one dies, But if you have listened to this show long enough, you know I also really do enjoy a bad day at work episode where the opposite is also true. In today's story, no one dies. That said, some people are going to lose their hair and have their fingers soldered or are qulded together at work. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout your human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will see how the simple act of going Blomity Black turned one of the most physically unimpressive animals on Earth into its most dangerous one. You'll learn why I am calling the scariest thing the Sun will ever do to us, Big Girl Summer, and we will figure out why. If today's episode ever repeats itself, we will all be discussing axes and hockey pads and squirrel recipes. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would hear how the early telegraph basically worked like hey Man's sword, transforming jackasses into a holes, you would learn just how bad every planet in our solar system wants you dead, plus how they would do it, and you would hear how Today's story plus Frankenstein plus New York City con artists directly led to the creation of all modern science fiction. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Previously on doomsday, in the last episode, I came to the epiphany that controlled fire was the first human invention, for lack of a better word. On today's episode, I'm going to be making the argument that as important as fire has been over the years, the simple act of passing information back and forth is our truest superpower and arguably the most important and fundamental survival strategy or technology our species has ever developed. More important than fire, or tools or agriculture. All that we are and all that we have accomplished, all of it, everything stems from communication, and it has become the thing that most separates us from other animals. Many animals communicate, obviously, but how many can share accumulated knowledge between each other and then pass it down across generations. Without that, every new generation would have to start from scratch, with no understanding of how to make fire, or medical knowledge, or engineering or agriculture or navigation, or even cultural expectations. Imagine having to reinvent and rediscover calculus and thermodynamics and what a car is over and over and over. It would be chaos. Anthropologists call everything that we know cumulative culture, and without it, with no shared information, there's no large scale coordination, and without that, no civilization. And it's more than that when you think about it. Compared to a lot of other creatures, were not the fastest or the strongest. We don't have claws or wings or a bony exoskeleton, were squishy and vulnerable, and according to science, were not even that tasty. But language lets us remember and share information from one mind to another, and that turned us one of the more physically unimpressive animals on Earth into its most dangerous one. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to share the secret to controlling fire and our family tree would have ended a long time ago. Language is arguably our most important human invention, and for most of human history, information moved no faster than a horse could run. Messages were handed off to someone who physically carried them away over hill and yawned for days or weeks until they found their intended recipient. And to the modern ear that sounds like madness. But entire empires rose and fell on this technology and the speed and luckiness of their messengers. Of course, you could write a fairly long book about how history would have changed for the better or the worse, depending entirely on how slow or lost or dead some messenger got. Even in the early nineteenth century, if you needed to send a letter from New York to New Orleans that could take weeks. News was always old by the time it arrived, but it got a little quicker in the seventeen nineties when a Frenchman named Claude Shop created something called the semaphore telegraph. Picture being in a tower on a hilltop looking through a telescope at a tower on some other hill while a man in that tower emphatically waved giant mechanical scarecrow arms into a kind of early sign language that you would then recreate to relay to some other tower farther away, and so on and so on and so on, until the message arrived at some far off location. This way, in about half an hour, you could send a message as far as a horse could go. In twenty four hours. Of course, a horse would break down into bloody pieces trying to accomplish that feat. The semaphore telegraph became the first large scale high speed communication network in human history. Information could finally be transmitted faster than physical travel, which would have seemed like witchcraft not that long ago. Telegraph as a word comes from the French, but its roots come from ancient Greek, which basically cobbled together into writing at a distance. But as the novelty wore off and the shoulder injuries accrued, just like Dylan, the future of telecommunications went electric. Electricity stopped being a parlor trick. In the late seventeen hundreds, scientists across Europe were experimenting with sparks and wires and crude batteries, and some speculated if electricity could travel through a wire instantly, maybe messages could too. When the electric telegraph first bbit beeped its way to life in the eighteen thirties. It shrunk the world overnight by making distance irrelevant. There were plenty of systems designed to spell out letters and words, but each was more technical and complicated than the last. No, the solution wasn't going to come in the form of some elaborate switchboards of lights and fields of stenographers recording and interpreting like something out of Close Encounters of the third kind. No, the technical breakthrough they needed wasn't going to be electrical. It was going to be conceptual. And then Samuel Morse balks in all oi with a single wire, switching on and off in a controlled pattern, we can recreate language. Morse had become obsessed with the idea that short signals, long signals, and pauses could be translated into language in real time, which he did with the famous code that today carries his name, and suddenly telegraphy became useful. In eighteen forty four, the first long distance telegraph line in the United States was completed between Washington, d C. And Baltimore, and Morse's first message, early enough was what hath God wrought as if he was Oppenheimer, opening Pandora's box. Before long, thin iron wires stretched across fields and fence posts, through trees and over rail lines and over rivers and sagging between poles and connecting cities everywhere. They were usually soft iron wire, not copper, and the insulation was crude. Sometimes nonexistent batteries were used to push electric signals through the wires, but sometimes they faced strong electrical resistance, and the signals we can noticeably over distance. They could only travel so far before becoming unreadable. Oh and the wires easily corroded and sometimes snapped in the wind, and sometimes animals chewed through them, or trees fell on them, and lightning absolutely adored them, and when they got wet, that could really eat into the signal. Quality. Copper was better in every way, but it was expensive, and because of that people sometimes treated it like free candy. And do you know why today we have wiry poles crisscrossing every inch of the planet. Well, it is because around this same time they did try burying the wires, but the insulation was not up to the job, and the electrical signals just sort of leeched and faded into the soil. Plus they would immediately forget where they had buried the things, and then couldn't fix them when they rotted. So the legacy is everybody now has wires hanging everywhere, And although these wires were not buried, they were grounded directly into the earth, which is an unusual concept for a lot of people. So I'm gonna try to explain it like I'm five. You know how you hear about how airplanes fly by using drag and lyft and wind under the wings to defy gravity, and you say, nah, buying that planes are too heavy. Well, for those of you feel this way, wait till I explain the following. Imagine you and a friend are sending messages back and forth electrically, and electricity works like a circuit, so it needs to complete a loop to really work, like being on a racetrack where you leave the starting line and then go all the way away and then back to the beginning. At first, people thought telegraphs were going to need two wires running between different cities, one wire to send a signal and the other to bring the electricity back. But then they discovered something pretty clever. The ground under our feet can carry electricity too, so they really only needed one wire attached to a metal rod stuck into the ground At each station, the message would travel along the wire to the station, and then the electricity would slip into the ground and quietly travel back through the earth to where it came from. By letting the planet do half the work, they only needed half as many wires, which made things cheaper and easier to build, and thus easier to cote the country in them. By the time telephone and power lines were invented, they just picked up from Telegraphy's example and added more wires and more poleslegraph Lines were only as good as the people who worked them. Operators with an ear for it could hear words in the rhythm of tippy taps without the need to consciously count out dots and dashes. And as networks expanded, all that tippy tap quietly rewired society. Railroads used it to coordinate movements, Newspapers used it to report stories within hours instead of weeks. Financial markets became dependent on it. Hell, everything became dependent on it. And you're not going to need an electricians degree to appreciate this episode, and there's no test at the end, but let me just say Telegraphy wasn't history safest desk job operators worked hands on with live circuits. One day you might electrocute a finger. Another day they might be tippy tapping out your obituary. The job looks simple enough, obviously, calmly tapping out messages at a desk. What wasn't as obvious was the fact that early telegraph operators were sitting at the end of hundreds of miles of exposed electrical wire in an age before electrical safety was understood. Telegraph circuits were capable of pulling whatever electrical currents the atmosphere or the weather decided to send down the line, so you should not be shocked to learn that the most common injury were electric shocks. If you touched the exposed metal contacts while the circuit was engaged, your body would become a temporary part of that electrical circuit. I say temporary because you will break before the circuit does. Electricity always follows the simplest path, and since your body is full of water and dissolved salts, electricity assumes that you are way into it, but really you're just cooking. And as I have said before, the worst thing about being altcuted is your nerves fry, and your muscles clamp involuntarily, meaning you can't let go of the thing that is killing you. Under normal circumstances, just every day tippy tappying, the current is relatively small enough that a bad day at work is more painful than life threatening. But telegraph wires stretched for hundreds of miles across open countryside and effectively acted like a giant lightning rod. And if you are old enough to remember landline telephones, you remember how they told you not to use them during lightning storms. Well, if lightning did hit a line, the surge could and did travel straight into telegraph equipment and sometimes destroy it. Telegraph equipment sometimes sparked or arcd or burnt fingers or hands or the face, and singed hair or clothes, and sometimes removed an eyebrow. In fact, sometimes when it follow the lines into telegraph offices, those offices burned down. And today we are going to talk about a storm more strange and powerful than any earthly lightning storm. Our story today begins bright and early on the morning of September one, eighteen fifty nine. But first, back to the sun. No star is a calm place to hang out and our Sun is no different. First off, I sometimes see memes where people say, if there's no oxygen in space, why is the Sun burning exactly? Okay, Well, the Sun is basically a giant nuclear fusion reaction, and the only reason it doesn't tear itself apart in space is because of the intense gravity of the whole thing holding it all together. When you look up at a star, you are looking at a ball of hydrogen and helium so large that it collapses under its own immense gravity, which squeezes it into a ball so tight it says nuclear forces powers go, and the atoms crush together so hard that they fuse into even heavier atoms, and that whole dance releases crazy amounts of energy in the forms of heat and light, not flames. Gravity near the Sun is twenty eight times heavier than you're used to here on Earth. So for reference, a two hundred pound person would weigh about four hundred and eighty pounds on Jupiter, but they would weigh fifty six hundred pounds on the Sun if that were possible. The Sun is strong enough to burn your skin ninety million miles away, so you should see what it can do. Up close. By the time you got to within maybe forty thousand kilometers or twenty five thousand miles from it, the radiant heat alone would be so intense that your suit would melt and all of the moisture and your body would boil away, and then you'd just vaporize. I don't know how many favorite facts you have about our Sun, but I have three. On a local level, the Sun is roughly four hundred times larger than the Moon, but also about four hundred times further away, which means from the Earth, the Moon and the Sun appear nearly identical in size, which sounds crazy. And without that insane cosmological coincidence, the Moon would never be able to slide in front of the Sun so perfectly that we see the event as a solar eclipse. If the sizes or distances were any different, this would not be able to happen. On an intergalactic level, when we look to the sky and see a trillion nameless stars, each is separated from each other by an unimaginably untravelable gulf of space, and yet we've got one of them right there. I'm literally pointing at one right now. We're parked right beside it, and I think that is fascinating. And the third and the craziest is that if sound could pass through the vacuum of space, the Sun would be so loud that even from one hundred and fifty million kilometers or ninety three million miles away, it would still be as loud for you as standing beside a jackhammer or a helicopter all day, all night, forever. The Sun is spectacularly loud. It generates tens of thousands of watts of sound power on every square meter of its surface, and that surface is about ten thousand times larger than ours. Imagine one hundred metal bands playing at you at full blast, all at the same time. Now imagine that sound on full time, no breaks, not for one second's piece, pouring down on you until you go deaf and probably die from a stress related coronary. But blessedly mercifully, sound cannot travel through a vacuum, so no way of transmitting this low based celestial plague of all penetrating and permanent auditory suffocation. And I'm going to go so far as to say that not only would you go deaf, you would also effectively go blind because of how badly your corneas would be rattling. This would be the kind of thing that you wouldn't hear. You would just obey. And why so loud you ask? Okay. Well, at its core, the gravity inside the Sun crushes six hundred million tons of hydrogen until the atoms fuse every second, and when they do, a tiny sliver of that mask gets turned into light and heat. Like we said, And eight minutes later that light arrives here on Earth and we all get to see it, and I wouldn't want to take it in any closer. On the surface of the Sun, blobs of plasma the size of continence boil. Overwhelming pressure ignites the hydrogen deep within, and the plasma wants to blow apart explosively. In you go see space, but between the Sun's intense gravity and magnetic fields. You can see videos online of plasma flares leaping far into space from the Sun's surface before twisting and stretching and snapping and then falling and reabsorbing back into the Sun. Some of these flares casually carry more energy than we will ever create in all of human history. And as a reminder, the Sun doesn't burn. The process is driven by nuclear forces not oxygen like we said, so this reaction can continue for billions of years, while five billion years after that they figure that the core will run out of hydrogen and helium, and then fusion will stop, and then gravity will squeeze what remains, and our friend will become a red giant step which ain't great. At that point, the outer layers of the Sun will expand dramatically, making it about two hundred times larger than it appears today. It'll glow red and it won't be as hot, but you will not care, because it'll probably swallow mercury and venus and Earth during its big girl summer. Also, probably about four billion years before that happens, it'll brighten and heat us to the point where the greenhouse effect goes so crazy that compared to modern day venus, we are going to look like a char broiled hell hole. The Sun will start farting away its mass into beautiful, glowing bubbles of ionized material, tens of trillions of kilometers of cross, and when all is said and done, the remainder will shrink down into a white dwarf star, about half as heavy as it started, but only about the size of Earth. If the Earth itself were squished down to white dwarf matter, it would end up as a ball about three hundred kilometers across. A single teaspoon of white dwarf matter would weigh a little more than a Dodge Caravan, which for reference, a twenty thirteen Dodge Grand Caravan has a curb weight of forty five hundred pounds. But back to our Sun. The Sun's eruptions can be pretty chaotic, but it does have fairly predictable patterns, and we call them solar cycles. There is one cycle every eleven years where the Sun's magnetic field goes a little gonky and sun spots take center stage for a bit. Sunspots are cooler, magnetically tangled patches of the Sun's surface that appear darker compared to all of the surrounding blazing plasma. The Sun's surface normally hovers around fifty five hundred celsius or ten thousand degrees fahrenheit, while a sunspot is usually closer to maybe three thousand to forty five hundred degrees celsius. That said, all areas of the Sun's surface appeared dark if you look at the Sun long enough. One of these solar cycles coincided with eighteen fifty nine, and in late August and early September of that year, the sun was not calm. Back in eighteen fifty nine, people knew that the sun was a physical object and not some divine or mystical force, but not much else. Most of what they understood came from simple observation, and two of the most important observers would turn out to be a couple of dicks named Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson. Richard Carrington was a well educated Englishman studying at the University of Cambridge. He spent years carefully recording sunspots as patterns and squiggles that astronomy at the time barely understood. Rather than using a telescope and burning a hole through his optic nerve bring and skull, he instead projected the Sun's image through the telescope onto a white screen and sketched what he saw by hand. This was the kind of quiet and solitary work where nothing happens. Usually, day after day he sat at his telescope doodling away, when on the morning of September first, he saw two brilliant bursts of sparkling white light erupting from the Sun. At the same time, Richard Hodgson had been watching from a small private observatory in Saint John's Wood, and what they saw was the very first solar flare ever observed by a human being. Both men calmly recorded what they saw, all like okay, not at all understanding that they had just made one of the most important observations in the history of solar science. And they just submitted their findings to the Royal astro Ronomical Society. This was the first recorded observation of a solar flare in history. But and this is a pretty big butt, they didn't even know what they were looking at, and they had no clue that this could somehow be connected to the fact that telegraph systems had been malfunctioning worldwide. We all know that solar radiation bouncing around the upper atmosphere can create beautiful aurora borealis, and people spend thousands of dollars traveling the world to witness their beauty. But at this time auroras were appearing all the way down into tropical latitudes as far as Cuba and Columbia. But again, people didn't have the concept of space as a medium outside Earth. That is how old this was. They didn't understand magnetic fields, and they really didn't have a good vocabulary for space weather. They knew less about the sun than a modern children's textbook, so that is where they were as our adopted peer group. For this episode, Carrington jotted down that it was a bright light or a white light flare, and then wrote cool. For many, the display in the atmosphere was staggering and mind bending. Auroras illuminated the night sky with vivid reds and greens and purples and whites, pulsing and shifting rapidly across the sky. Even in South America, people described the sky glowing with a pale white or crimson light so strong they were able to read from it and cast shadows. In places, the aurora became so bright that people woke up thinking it was morning and went to work, while for others the whole thing was let's say, deeply unsettling. Across North America and Europe, auroras appeared deep red and covered large sections of the sky, so a lot of people assumed that they were seeing cities or forests burning in the distance. Others believed it was a biblical omen of judgment day, So this is not a great way to start a Thursday. And the one thing no one realized was that the bulk of what was coming our way a massive flare of electromagnetic radiation and X rays and ultraviolet light and radio waves and extremely hot charged particles like protons and electrons. And when this kind of thing hits our atmosphere, it kind of smears around it, sometimes messing with radio waves, sometimes producing auroras. But the way it works, it normally only happens closer to the polar regions. The flare that we are talking about was first noticed before noon, and by late that afternoon and into the next day, it reached the peak of its intensity. The X scale, as it would come to be known, wouldn't be created for another one hundred and six sixteen years, but it was used to group solar flares into five categories of strength, each about ten times stronger than the previous. It was abcm, and X, and they called it the xcale because it measured the intensity of X rays coming from the sun and for context, flares above X twenty are already considered extreme, and if measured on today's scale, the flare that we are describing today would likely rate as an X forty to X fifty or higher. When Earth's magnetic feel convulsed, massive currents of electrical potential were inducted into the ground, and telegraph systems behaved in ways that no one could have anticipated. On a normal day, like any appliance without electrical input being forced into it, the system was dead. But today, even without batteries connected, the system went wild. It would have been like watching a car run out of gas and then just start up and fly off into the sky. Telegraph wires sparked and threw out showers of fire. Operators received electrical shocks, and some telegraph offices burned to the ground. And this continued until September the third. Earth's magnetic field had been oscillating so violently, but eventually the storm did weaken and things began to return to normal. And you say, well, that doesn't sound so bad. Well no, because global infrastructure was not yet completely dependent on electricity, so yeah, no, big whoop. The height of technology was electrical cable, so the world suffered limited lasting damage. Fires were extinguished, telegraph systems were repaired, help wanted signs for new telegraph operators went up and life went back to normal. So what happened? I know you're thinking, wait, that that's it, that's my disaster. A light show that made people's compasses burst into flames and a couple of telegraph operators got electrocuted. Well, see, that's just it. It is easy to look at this event and the surrounding chaos and think, well, I'm glad that's over put. Simply, if a normal solar flare is like a thunderstorm that bounces off our electromagnetic field, and a major flare is more like a hurricane that bounces off our em field, what happened in eighteen fifty nine was like a record breaking super hurricane moving at on real speed that hit us at our most vulnerable point. And this all happened at a time when we didn't even know why the sun shined, at a time when people thought the Milky Way was the whole universe, a point in history where they wouldn't even know what they would even be warning people about if they even knew what they were looking at. So, in late August of eighteen fifty nine, astronomers from across Europe and North America had no idea the sun was entering one of the most violent eruptive phases ever recorded. Our story today actually began on August twenty eighth, eighteen fifty nine, as the Earth found itself bathed in a powerful geomagnetic storm. Auroras stretched all the way through the equator, and telegraph operators started reporting shocks and sparks and wonky signals, and on September first, the solar flare to end all solar flares, which lasted for about five minutes and then seventeen hours later reappeared here on Earth as we were blasted by a massive cloud of solar plasma and magnetometers caught on fire. It was on see. There is a thing called cme cannibalism, and basically it means that sometimes a solar flare will leave the Sun and blast a hole in the solar winds like a curler sweeping the ice to reduce resistance, so when the next solar flare comes it can make a clean getaway without resistance, and then it can try to set a new speed record. It is believed that all of the earlier activity pushed and cleared everything away, which helped the flare not only travel so far so fast, but also remain magnetically coherent, and you're all, so, what, okay. Normally, if you've ever seen a video of a flare leaving the Sun, they tend to break apart chaotically and then rip apart at the edges as it travels. But the eighteen fifty nine flare largely kept it together, making sure that the fists that hit us was tight, and the energy behind this event had been stored for days or weeks before what came next, And here's what was happening. You ever see footage of Jupiter spinning and all of those vertical bands of planet wide storms are all doing their own thing. It's a little like that for the Sun, where because it's spinning, the Sun's equator tends to bulge out a little bit, where the Sun appears to spin faster around the equator than it does at the poles, And that means that sometimes the invisible magnetic field lines that help make sunspots can get twisted and stretched by the difference, Like if one side of a line was in a slower spot nearer the poles, but the other side was near a faster spot near the equator. That definitely makes things messy, and it allows for loops of superheated plasma to arc way high into the corona and photosphere all stressed and contorted. And I want you to try to get your head around the size of these flares. For moderate M class solar flares, which happen fairly often, let me say it like this. The Sun's width or diameter is about one point four million kilometers or eight hundred and sixty five thousand miles across. Okay, you've got that in your head. These flares can be anywhere from ten to fifty thousand kilometers or up to thirty thousand miles across, but they extend twice that in height, and then that plasma can shoot out as much as three hundred thousand kilometers or one hundred and eighty thousand miles into space. And a lot of these flares are about as wide as our planet. In fact, the loops of a major flare could easily circle the Earth with room to spare. And these arches can rise at least ten to twenty earths tall. So yeah, they big, and they contain as much energy as millions and millions of nuclear bombs, and they can last for hours. By the morning of September first, eighteen fifty nine, the magnetic structure above one sunspot group had reached a breaking point, and what finally unleashed what history would come to know as the Carrington Flare, was a process called magnetic reconnection. It's like the sudden rewiring of the Sun's magnetic field lines, if that makes sense. Basically, the Sun punched a hole in its own magnetic field and through part of its atmosphere into space, and what they saw that day was a full on coronal mass ejection back on Earth. Most people think of electricity like this. There's a power plant, and then there's your home, and then there's a bunch of connective wires in between. But then a tree falls on a line or a transformer explodes in the heat, and a whole area goes dark. I once lost power for three days because a power line fell in Ohio. Everything depends on everything else staying upright. Our power grids have a real butterfly effect thing going on, And the only reason that you got to download this episode is because of a delicate balance of irregular maintenance and luck that keeps power lines from dropping all around you. On an ordinary day. Your electrical grid is constantly shifting power around fallen lines or spikes in demand, and when one line fails, that load shifts to a neighboring line, which then strains and heats up, and eventually the system will just shut down to protect itself. But coronal mass ejections don't behave like that at all. They just force electricity into the grid. If that were to happen today, your phone wouldn't melt in your hand, but electronics could be permanently disabled, and most of the systems we rely on for everything would be pooched, and the timeline to repair all of this is not great. You would be surprised how little time has to pass after a catastrophe for people to start dying. People would starve, pacemakers would explode, people would lose their minds. For a long time, I had this belief in my head that the more complicated a drink order that someone might make at Starbucks, the less likely they would be to survive in an apocalypse. A strong enough coronal mass ejection could blow up transformers, and I mean the things on the power poles, not the robots, which would plunge everything into darkness, and we won't have the ability to manufacture new ones or anything for that matter, And since retrofitting modern cargo ships for sail power hasn't taken off, global trade would then grind to a halt. And once people realize the last cans of food in the store are the last cans of food they will probably see for the rest of their lives. And with all of the debit and credit card readers now extinct, people are going to have to start figuring out some fairly alternative lifestyles. I'm talking about axes and hockeypads. We all become mad Max style scavenger while the rich are either killed or become warlords. I myself will be constructing a tribuche that I can use to ingratiate myself to my local warlord, and they can use it to erate people's homes. I'm just saying, eating squirrels is going to be one of the least weird adjustments that you are going to find yourself making. Now. I described earlier how a flare would wrap and smear around our magnetosphere, which causes it to wobble and move, But when something this powerful hits, it's more like watching a face after getting slapped in slow motion. On a normal day, the magnetosphere flexes under steady solar winds coming off of the Sun, and when a coronal mass ejection arrives, that magnetosphere doesn't have time to react, and it absorbs the energy the way you might absorb getting hit by a car. The field's huge magnetic blast just happened to match the magnetic shape of our protective aura, and as a result, instead of being pushed away, the Sun's energy poured straight into our magnetosphere, overwhelming it. The Sun farted hard right into our mouth during the peak of its solar activity and slipped in on a bad orientation. When they built telegraph systems, originally they did it with the sole hope of getting an electrical signal all the way from point A to point B as legibly as possible. You know what, No one considered how to create a system physically robust enough to withstand alien electrical forces attacking from space. It was eighteen fifty nine. We just did not even have the imagination for that. And I remind you we barely understood what the sun even was at this time. At the time of his discovery, Carrington thought that maybe light had been leaking into his equipment and playing tricks on him. But no, and just as quickly a as it started, it faded, and like I said, the entire episode only lasted maybe five minutes, and a vast cloud of magnetized plasma arrived in only seventeen hours. In the future, when solar flares were better understood, we came to understand that a typical solar flare could take as long as four days to reach us. For reference, a typical flare travels about four hundred kilometers or six hundred and twenty miles per second. The Carrington flare hit US at twenty four hundred kilometers or fifteen hundred miles per second. That would be fast enough to go from Toronto all the way to Vancouver in less than one and a half seconds, and measurements went off the charts. I should mention that even back then, we did understand that our planet had some kind of protective magnet based shield, and we even knew how to kind of read it using a magnetograph. It basically works the same as a seismograph, tracing fluctuations in the magnetic field using surprise magnets and drawing a line along a slowly moving drum of paper. When the leading edge of the flare arrived, those slow curves jumped and the pens left the paper, suggesting whatever was happening was completely off the charts and couldn't even be measured. No one who saw it ever forgot it. The telegraph, as a dominant technology, was eventually upstaged by the telephone and the radio, and eventually electronic communication systems and skilled operators became unemployed fossils. But every modern communication, whether it uses fiber optic cables or satellites, owes their existence to those early iron wires displayed across the horizon and the people who tippy tapped them into the future. Scientists believe this geomagnetic disturbance was at least two to three times as strong as the most powerful storms of the twentieth century, including the March nineteen eighty ninth flare that cooked North America and plunged about six million quebecers into chili darkness that was about an x fifteen. On Halloween of two thousand and three, a solar flare that potentially reached as high as an X forty five crapped all over Sweden's power grid, pooched aviation communications, and even fried some satellites. There have been no shortage of solar flares throughout history, but the Carrington event remains the most famous and became a kind of foundation for modern space weather science. We learned that our normally benign local star had a temper, and we witnessed the most energetic thing ever observed. What they saw was not just a little bigger than a typical solar flare, It was a glimpse of the upper physical limits of what the Sun can unleash. Statistical models say the probability of getting hit by something like this is less than one percent in a decade, which makes it sound like it's not so bad. However, what would have provided a real did you see that moment in eighteen fifty nine? Would have you deciding which of your pets to eat first in the modern day, So yeah, it's serious. The eighteen fifty nine event, even today, remains central to our disaster preparedness discussions. If a Carrington size event happened today, studies suggest it would disable satellites, collapse power grids, kill communications, GPS, aviation, the Internet, and create trillions and trillions in economic damage. Today, the Carrington geomagnetic superstorm of eighteen fifty nine is recognized as the strongest most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history and a cautionary tale of a very real possibility of the end of human civilization. When I was listing off my favorite things about the Sun earlier, I couldn't find a good way to shoehorn in my favorite fact about the solar system. So I'm going to do that now. Because of the whole oxygen thing, Earth is the only place we know of where you are going to find and open flame in the known universe. You might have said that you love Earth because it's the place you keep all your stuff, and you love that it has hamburgers and waterfalls, But I'm going with a fundamental force of destruction. Go figure. Earth is also the place where I keep all my stuff. So yes, mortal possessions plus fire equals a bad combo, but it's still a good place overall, and I'm going to give it four and a half stars. You want to hear something annoying about today's episode. You know they only called it the Carrington Event lazily enough because Richard Carrington's report got picked up and acknowledged before Richard Hodgson's Hodgson's Report was used as confirmation of the Carrington discovery. I've talked before about people making incredible scientific breakthroughs or discoveries only to get turfed into history's dumpster before and anyone with any heart would have called it the Carrington Hodgson event, but history went a different way. And please do not quote me on this, but dear Richard Hodgson, history wanted me to remind you to go for yourself. And now I will tell you how Carrington's life was destroyed just a few years later see Carrington and found out that his wife had been porking a close friend and fellow observatory worker, which was scandalous and devastating for his reputation as a Victorian gentleman. And then he came home, found the two of them together, thought about it for a second, and then beat the man half to death with a cane. His marriage fell apart, obviously, and then he quit like everything. He dismantled and sold off his observatory, he quit science altogether, and then he just went on to live a quiet life. And yeah, I understand, but I still feel terribly for the man, and it makes me think that if you made a discovery that changed the course of human history but lost it all because of some unbelievable Jerry Springer level family problem, you can always come and tell me all about it at patreon dot com slash Funeral Cuss and who knows, maybe become a future segment on the show. And it's not just the potential fame. I offer add free episodes, extra content, behind the scenes stuff, safety stuff, my mostly undivided attention, I mean, you name it. Donations from people like you are the only reason I've been able to do the show as often as I have. The majority of Patreon supporters sign up to make a small monthly donation to sustain the show, and then I assume an electrical discharge just electrocutes them through their keyboards and I never hear from them again. And I really hope you are all okay, and I appreciate you all for it all the same, And if you're not really into it, you could always just visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday and show your support with a one time donation. And at this point, as always, I have a heartfelt need to shout out Joshua Allen, Aaron Nickerson, Janis m and Regina Stewart for helping support the show and as always for everyone. You can reach out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave a review and more importantly, tell your friends. I always thank you all new and old for your support and encouragement. However, if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Menic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the globe to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot ca A on the next episode. There are no more unsettling vehicles in the world than a submarine, and nothing more unsettling on a submarine than a problem, and submarines can face two different types of problems, the kinds you can fix and the kinds you briefly discuss before you die screaming and drowning, or hit crush depth and implode. It's the Cursed submarine Disaster of two thousand. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.