Aftermath

Aftermath



Here Comes the Sun

Although the date would stump most trivia buffs, September 2, 1859, is when the greatest magnetic storm ever recorded hit the Earth. It is also the date likeliest to be replayed in 2012, with one important difference: this time, the devastation will be colossal. The Carrington event, named after Richard Carrington, the amateur British astronomer who took the lead in observing and explaining it, was actually a one-two punch that uppercut the Earth over the course of a week. The first of the two massive solar explosions began forming some-time in mid-August 1859, when an unusually large sunspot appeared on the northwest portion of the Sun’s face. On August 27, it erupted like a zit, shooting out a Moon-sized glob of plasma, or supercharged gas. Such blasts are known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs are usually shaped like croissants, according to a discovery made in 2009 by STEREO, a pair of NASA probes that flank the Sun and photograph these explosions from opposite sides. According to Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Laboratory, a computer model designer for the STEREO mission, CMEs are formed in a manner akin to that of twisting the ends of a rope around and around, tighter and tighter, until the middle bulges out. Instead of rope, Slinky-like lines of magnetic force twist out of the sunspots. Eventually, after enough twisting, the crescent-shaped coil of plasma snaps free and spins away from the Sun at a million miles per hour or more, which is just what happened in the Carrington event. The first cosmic croissant of the Carrington event hit Earth the next day, August 28, 1859, causing some of the most beautiful auroras ever seen. The northern lights don’t normally extend down to Havana, Cuba, but this time they did, making the sky there appear as though it were stained with blood and on fire. On September 1, 1859, the Sun erupted again, even more furiously. According to scientists’ reconstructions, the second Carrington CME was dozens of times more powerful than average, weighing in at about 10 billion tons and 10 trillion trillion watts (trillions of times more than the sum total of all electrical, mechanical, combustible, muscular, animal, and plant energy than has been produced or consumed in the history of the planet). Traveling at about 5 million miles per hour, it was also one of the fastest ever recorded. Think of a tennis ball machine suddenly rifling out a (molten, radioactive) basketball. When CMEs launch, they create a shockwave that slaps the solar wind, a sphere of charged particles, mostly protons.

Excerpted from Aftermath by Lawrence E. Joseph Copyright © 2010 by Lawrence E. Joseph. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.