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A Solar Storm Could Cripple the Global Internet

Massive explosions on the Sun's surface, known as solar storms or solar wind events, hurl enormous clouds of plasma into space. When these reach Earth, they trigger geomagnetic storms and spectacular auroras. But here's what should worry us: they could potentially bring down the entire internet.

Solar storm

A severe solar storm doesn't just create pretty lights in the sky. The consequences are serious—satellite radio waves, ground-based power transmission systems, and critical infrastructure all face disruption. For millions of people worldwide, that translates to major economic damage and work stoppages.

Here's how it works: electromagnetic waves interact with Earth's magnetic field, generating electrical currents in the upper atmosphere. This heats the air, causes the atmosphere to expand, and creates additional drag on satellites orbiting at low altitudes. Debris in space gets knocked off course too. Even worse, these electromagnetic surges can disrupt radio signals and GPS systems.

The really dangerous part happens on the ground. Powerful currents flowing through the upper atmosphere can induce intense electrical currents in Earth's crust. These currents can damage power grids and cause blackouts in specific regions. This actually happened on March 13, 1989, in Quebec, Canada—the outage lasted 12 hours, according to NASA.

The good news? Major solar storms that directly impact Earth occur only 1.6% to 12% per decade. Historically, we've documented just two confirmed events: one in 1859 and another in 1921.

The 1859 Carrington Event remains the most powerful solar storm ever witnessed. Back then, electrical infrastructure was still primitive, yet the storm torched electrical systems across Europe and North America, set buildings ablaze, and even triggered auroras near the equator in Colombia.

More recently, in February 2022, a solar storm damaged 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites just one day after their launch into low Earth orbit.

What's interesting here is that the impact of a similar geomagnetic event on today's interconnected internet infrastructure remains unknown territory. Fiber optic cables themselves are largely protected from geomagnetically induced currents, so local and regional internet connections would likely survive relatively unscathed. The real concern is intercontinental undersea fiber networks. Their signal repeaters are extremely vulnerable to geomagnetic currents. If one repeater fails, the entire cable can become useless.

Undersea fiber optic cables that connect continents tell a different story. Signal repeaters on these cables are highly susceptible to geomagnetic interference. A single failure means the entire cable could go offline. Recovery takes months—underwater infrastructure repairs are time-consuming and extremely expensive.

Solar storms can severely damage undersea fiber repeaters
Solar storms pose serious risks to signal repeaters in undersea cables. Image: The Manomet Current.

According to Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, if a critical section of undersea fiber in one region gets hit, entire continents could lose communication with each other.

Countries at higher latitudes like the United States and United Kingdom face greater exposure to space weather events, so they'd likely experience the first wave of disruption if a massive geomagnetic storm struck.

A global internet outage would be catastrophic. Supply chains would halt. Stock markets would crash. Hospitals would struggle. Businesses would close. Personal communication would vanish. The knock-on effects would ripple through every sector of modern society.

Estimates suggest that a single day of internet disruption in the US alone could inflict over $7 billion in economic damage. If the outage lasted days or months, the financial toll would be staggering.

To prevent an "internet apocalypse," Abdu Jyothi argues that network operators expanding global internet infrastructure need to treat extreme space weather as a serious threat. Initial steps include deploying more cables at lower latitudes and conducting resilience testing against large-scale network failures.

The second priority is developing better long-term solar storm prediction methods. That's easier said than done. Currently, we can only forecast solar storms about two days before they hit, using observations of sunspots—dark patches on the Sun's surface.

NASA and the European Space Agency are working together, combining historical data with new observations to improve space weather forecasting capabilities. It's a race against time.

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