But in today’s completely electricity-dependent society, we’re much more vulnerable. In 1859, there wasn’t any electrical infrastructure important or complicated enough to cause real problems, so the solar storm, though intense, came and went. Even in cities where it was still night time, NASA states that “newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight.” At the same time, red, green, and purple auroras lit up the skies as far south as the Bahamas. The morning after what’s now known as the Carrington event, the sun’s electrons arrived and promptly found telegraph wires, causing power surges that shocked operators, set fire to papers in telegraph offices, and rendered man-made electricity useless in the machines they ran through. Even just eight minutes after the storm, an English 33-year-old amateur astronomer named Richard Carrington was trying to project sunspots onto a plate of glass when, as he later wrote, he thought “a ray of light had penetrated a hole in the screen attached to the object-glass … for the brilliancy was fully equal to that of direct sunlight.”Ĭarrington's drawing shows the bright, bean-shaped flares amid the sunspots, labeled A, B, C, and D. During the storm, the sun spit out a stream of plasma, white light, and electrons - a mere sliver of its total mass and energy - but that alone was strong enough to completely overwhelm Earth’s magnetic fields when it crashed into them just hours later. The last massive solar storm was on September 1, 1859, missing the era of global electrification by just a couple of decades.
As a species, we’re woefully unprepared for the moment when it does. These happen all the time on a geologic scale, but one hasn’t yet occurred in the electrical era. It’s possible that the same could happen now - but on a global scale.Ī blackout this intense could happen if our planet careens into the path of a massive solar storm. That blackout, caused by damage to a couple of transmission lines at a nearby nuclear plant, lasted two days and caused unprecedented chaos. On July 13, 1977, as Brooklyn’s poorest residents took to the streets to direct traffic, store owners set their own shopfronts on fire to optimize their insurance payouts after looting. In a bid to subdue the widespread unrest across the country, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has declared a state of emergency, followed by a 36-hour-long curfew in the wake of calls for mass anti-regime protests.Exactly 40 years ago, America’s most dramatic blackout ever hit New York City, and the city went nuts. Agitators are blaming the Rajapaksa regime for the scarcity of essential goods and long power outages. Owing to the economic crisis in the country, public anger has been mounting against the government with protests having erupted in several parts of Sri Lanka, including the capital Colombo. There is also an acute shortage of medicines and milk powder.Īlso Read: Sri Lanka blocks social media platforms amid economic crisis
The island nation's retail inflation already touched 17.5 per cent in February and food inflation has soared to over 25 per cent, leading to highly inflated cereal and food prices. More unbelievably, one kg pack of milk powder costs Rs 1900. A kg of sugar costs Rs 240, while coconut oil is being sold for a whopping Rs 850 per litre.
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