About five weeks ago there was a once in a multiple decades event with a solar storm that was extremely strong. I had noticed from social media that the visibility of Auroras extended much closer to the equator than usual. Knowing that the bigger the storm the further from the poles it can be seen I went and checked out the Aurora visibility forecast page. Seeing that it was visible all the way as far north as NSW I knew it would be worth going and viewing as the chance to see it again from the Australian mainland could be many decades later. The biggest challenge was getting far enough awy from the light pollution, and in the era of ubiquitous high lumen power LED lighting the light pollution in the major cities in Australia is hideous. I made the decision that it was worth driving to the coast to both get further south and to get further away from the light pollution. A 2 hour drive later and I was glad that I did:

As you can see the light was bright enough at the peak to see it reflected off the waves at the beach.

These Aurora events are the result of charged particles from the sun reaching the atmosphere at very high speeds. This is the same atmosphere that, along with the magnetosphere, shields us from solar radiation that would otherwise be extremely harmful to us. Looking up at the Aurora you are seeing the interactions of this radiation with the atmosphere that protects us. The collisions of these charged particles into the atmosphere gives off light, this is the light we see in the Aurora. There was a period of 15 minutes of so close to midnight where the light became especially intense.

There were many other things I noticed with this event, the people who went to see it were able to witness something bigger than themselves. For a brief moment in time the tide of narcissism in the world was reversed. These sorts of events have an impact on a lot of people. Granted not everyone, some people just pay very little attention to their surroundings. However for the most part I noticed a noticeable shift in many people who witnessed this event. The reminder that the world does not revolve around us is a very important one in this modern world that's so geared towards the promotion of narcissism in people.

Perhaps one of the worst things about light pollution is the way in which it robs people of the ability to see the wonder that is in the stars. I got thinking about this last week while in regional Australia in a spot that had little light pollution. What you can see there is fantastic, and it doesn't take a whole lot of powerful LED lighting to ruin this experience. There's something very inspiring about seeing the stars and its an experience that puts things into perspective.

Ever since I learned details about the Carrington Event, a major solar storm in 1859, I have been concerned about the impact of a large solar flare on contemporary life. Most people have no idea that this is even an issue so they never think about it. But as society has become increasingly dependent on electronic devices, the same devices that can be impacted by a sufficiently large solar storm. Because of our growing dependence on the electrical grid we have a much higher civilization impact level risk from an event on the order of magnitude of the Carrington Event than at any time before. This is why things like the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Center exist at all, these atmospheric weather conditions have tangible impacts on day to day life in the modern era.

On 13 March 1989, during Solar Cycle 22, a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of the grid in Quebec Canada. This led to a nine hour grid outage. Because magnetism and electric current flow are connected what can happen when there's a massive disturbance to the electrical field of the Earth is that it can cause current to be induced in conducting materials on the Earth's surface. In the case of things like high voltage transmission lines that can lead to things like circuit breakers being thrown. The induced currents in long spanning transmission lines can be quite large.

Thankfully it seems not too much of the electrical grid was impacted by this storm, at least not in Australia.