100 years ago, in 1921, a series of fires were recorded throughout the world in the electrical and telegraph control rooms. All these fires were caused by magnetic fields, generated on Earth, by one of the largest solar storms to hit the planet.
If one of these super storms hit the Earth today it would cause a great disaster, especially in the communication and electricity networks, explained the doctor in geophysics Jeffrey Love to the British media The Independent. “When we look back at that time, everything related to electricity was not as important in 1921 as it is today,” stated the doctor.
Solar storms originate when a blast of plasma conducts electricity, known as coronal mass ejection (CME).
If a CME were to go to our planet, it is estimated that it would arrive in a couple of days, since they usually have a speed of 2,000 kilometers per second. As it is a conductor of electricity, it interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, in turn producing electric fields on the conducting surface of the planet.
“So it ends up shorting this and you get currents in the grid system, which are unwanted or uncontrolled. And since the electrical grid system is about controlling currents and managing them, and basically, having alternating currents at a certain frequency ”, says Dr. Love, according to the British newspaper The Independent, about the effects of this.
These super storms can be especially catastrophic on grid transformers, as these transformers rely on a balancing of currents as voltages change, and unbalanced voltages could cause them to shut down completely.
Experts also indicate that the electricity grid would not be the only one affected by this phenomenon, but rather that satellite navigation could be significantly damaged.
However, there is still no concrete data on what would happen to internet connections and that is that although optical fibers are immune to these currents, most of these are connected to electrically powered repeaters which could be affected by are.
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