The Space Superstorms That Could Disrupt Modern Life
The Sun is currently very active, but nothing compared to a massive solar event that hit Earth 14,000 years ago. If a similar event happened today, the results could be devastating.
Some of the oldest trees on Earth, about 5,000 years old, have witnessed significant events like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the discovery of the Americas, and even the first Moon landing. These trees can also be preserved underground as fossils, connecting us to the past 30,000 years.
At first glance, these ancient trees might seem like silent observers, but they’re actually doing something amazing as they grow—recording the Sun’s activity. As trees go through photosynthesis, their appearance changes throughout the year, with lighter colors in spring and darker in autumn. This process creates a year-by-year record in the tree’s growth rings. “This gives us this really valuable archive of time capsules,” says Charlotte Pearson, a dendrochronologist who studies tree rings at the University of Arizona.
For most of the 20th century, scientists used tree rings to study changes over long periods, like decades. But at certain times, they found evidence of sudden, dramatic solar events. These findings reveal some disturbing insights into our Sun’s recent past.
Changes in the amount of a certain type of carbon in tree rings show that the Earth has been hit by strong bursts of energy from space in the past.
“Nobody expected a brief event to appear,” says Edouard Bard, a climatologist at the College de France in Paris. But in 2012, a PhD student named Fusa Miyake, now a cosmic ray physicist at Nagoya University in Japan, made an incredible discovery. While studying Japanese cedar trees, she found a massive spike in a type of carbon called carbon-14 from nearly 800 years ago, in 774 CE. “I was so excited,” Miyake says.
At first, Miyake and her colleagues doubted the data, but they soon realized that something had injected a huge number of particles into our atmosphere. This type of carbon-14 forms when high-energy particles strike nitrogen in the atmosphere. Initially linked to cosmic events like supernovae, studies now suggest it was likely caused by a massive burst of particles from the Sun, possibly from superflares much larger than anything we’ve seen in modern times.
“They require an event that’s at least ten times bigger than anything we’ve observed,” says Mathew Owens, a space physicist at the University of Reading in the UK. The first recorded solar flare was seen in the mid-19th century, linked to a massive geomagnetic storm in 1859, known as the Carrington Event, after Richard Carrington, one of the astronomers who observed it.
Miyake’s discovery was confirmed by other tree ring studies and ice core analyses from Antarctica and Greenland. These cores showed similar evidence of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36, produced in the same atmospheric process as carbon-14. Since then, more “Miyake events” have been found, with seven well-studied events occurring over the past 15,000 years. The most recent one happened just over 1,000 years ago in 993 CE. Researchers believe these events are rare but happen at somewhat regular intervals, possibly every 400 to 2,400 years.
The most powerful Miyake event was discovered in 2023 when Bard and his team found a carbon-14 spike in fossilized Scots pine trees in Southern France from 14,300 years ago. This spike was twice as strong as any previous Miyake event, suggesting these events could be even bigger than we thought.
What Causes the Northern Lights?
The Sun is getting more active, which means we can expect to see more beautiful and vibrant northern and southern lights in the coming months.
The Northern Lights, or aurorae, are caused by charged particles from the Sun being directed by Earth’s magnetic field to the poles, where they collide with atmospheric gases, creating different colors. The stronger the solar event, the bigger the aurorae. Increased solar activity can also affect Earth’s magnetic field, leading to geomagnetic storms.
The team that discovered this superstorm from space searched the Southern French Alps for fossilized trees, some of which were exposed by rivers. They collected samples with chainsaws and examined them in a lab, where they found evidence of a massive carbon-14 spike. “We dreamed of finding a new Miyake event, and we were very, very happy to find this,” says Cécile Miramont, a dendrochronologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and a co-author of the study.
Deep Impact
If a similar event happened today, the effects could be catastrophic. “People who lived thousands of years ago would have probably seen auroras, lights in the sky,” says Pearson. “They might have marveled at that. But beyond that, this wouldn’t have impacted them at all. We’re the first society on Earth that might witness one of these events who would be intensely vulnerable and massively impacted by it.”
These storms can cause chaos on Earth. Geomagnetic storms can swell our atmosphere, increasing drag on satellites (for example, the Hubble telescope dropped by 40-80m per day during the geomagnetic storms in May 2024). They can also mess with power networks, knocking out those that aren’t shut down in time, like what happened in Quebec in 1989 when a power grid went down for nine hours, leaving six million people without power.
The question is, could they really be much worse? – Raimund Muscheler
The most powerful solar storm in recent history, the Carrington Event of 1859, caused intense auroras and electrical surges that knocked out telegraph lines worldwide. Today, a similar event could cause widespread disaster. The Global Positioning System (GPS) might fail as satellites are displaced or damaged, and multiple power grids and even the internet could go down. In 2013, a report estimated the economic loss in the US alone from a Carrington-level event could be $0.6tn-$2.6tn (£0.4tn-£2tn).
Miyake events, however, are much more intense, with blasts of particles at least ten times larger than the Carrington event. In fact, the Carrington event barely shows up in tree rings at all compared to a Miyake event. “It doesn’t show up,” says Pearson. “Either that means there’s something different going on, or Miyake events are on a much greater scale than the Carrington event. That’s where the potentially dramatic side lies. If they are events like the Carrington event but just on a larger scale, we need some serious mitigation strategies as quickly as possible.”
An event on the scale of the one that hit Earth 14,300 years ago could cause such widespread damage to our modern technology that it’s hard to imagine.
“The Carrington event is presumed to be the worst-case scenario,” says Raimund Muscheler, a solar scientist at Lund University in Sweden. “So the question is, could they really be much worse?” We know that some stars, particularly red dwarves, which are smaller and dimmer than our Sun, are prone to superflares that can tear apart the atmospheres of nearby planets. While it’s unlikely our Sun poses such a danger to Earth, the existence of Miyake events raises the possibility that it could produce bursts of much more extreme activity than we’ve observed before—even more powerful than the Carrington event.
If a big solar storm were to happen today, it could cause huge power surges that would damage or destroy a lot of our power grids, leading to widespread power outages.
What’s still unclear is the link between Miyake events and geomagnetic storms. The carbon-14 spikes from these events likely come from bursts of highly energetic particles from the Sun. But it’s not certain if these events always cause CMEs that trigger powerful geomagnetic storms on Earth. “When you have very big storms at the Sun, you often get a lot of energetic particles and CMEs,” says Silvia Dalla, a solar physicist at the University of Central Lancashire. But she notes the link is “not exactly one to one.”
Energetic particles can also come from sunspots, twisted magnetic fields that cool parts of the Sun’s surface and drive activity, but not all of them produce large eruptions. Some researchers say there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between Miyake events and sunspots. Instead, they might be due to longer periods of solar activity that last a year or more.
For our technology-dependent world, that’s a huge concern.
With such a barrage of high-energy particles and radiation, almost all but the best-shielded equipment could be at risk.
“Satellites could be destroyed,” says Muscheler.
We’re the first society on Earth that might witness one of these events who would be intensely vulnerable – Charlotte Pearson
Infrastructure on Earth would be at risk too. “You get particles that whizz through a chip and change one of the bits from a one to a zero,” says Owen. It’s something that happens from time to time under normal conditions, leading to confusing and unexpected computer errors. But a Miyake event would cause so many errors that electronic systems would likely become unusable or even destroy the delicate circuitry.
“In something that’s controlling the fuel going in and out of a nuclear power station, you really worry about that stuff,” says Owens. “In space weather, we tend to talk about the one-in-100-year events, but the nuclear industry is often worried about the one-in-1,000-year events, the really big stuff.”
Bursts of solar particles would also mess with aviation, causing flights to be diverted away from the poles where the particles are funneled by Earth’s magnetic field, to protect passengers from potentially harmful radiation levels. But since these particles travel from the Sun to Earth at nearly the speed of light, taking just eight minutes, there wouldn’t be much time to prepare. “You tend to know an event is ongoing more than you can really forecast them,” says Owens.
Sizing Up the Sun
Of course, tree rings only give us a snapshot of the year when a Miyake event happened, so it’s unclear if these events are the result of one big solar burst or several periods of increased activity over a year.
“One of the things we’ve thought about is that the kind of scale of these events would be like the Sun going through some kind of giant hiccup,” says Pearson.
But researchers are racing to figure out how big these events might be. New technology, like hypersensitive space telescopes, might help us observe more powerful events on other stars. In the meantime, however, Miyake events remain something of a mystery. “There are still more questions than answers,” says Bard.
As researchers hunt for more Miyake events, there’s still no way to know when the next one might occur, but the results from Bard’s study suggest these events might be far more powerful than previously thought. And for a society that relies so heavily on technology, that’s a concern that scientists will continue to study for years to come.
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