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Solar superstorm (Carrington-class)
A coronal mass ejection strong enough to induce damaging currents in long power lines and pipelines, disable satellites and disrupt navigation. The 1859 Carrington event disrupted telegraph systems worldwide, with reports of sparks and fires; a far weaker storm in 1989 blacked out Quebec for about nine hours. A repeat today would hit a much more electrified world.
The tier rates the quality of the evidence, not how likely the event is.
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- 1A large coronal mass ejection hits Earth's magnetic field● strong evidence
- 2Geomagnetically induced currents flow through long conductors (power lines, pipelines)● strong evidence
- 3Transformer damage and regional blackouts (Quebec, 1989)● strong evidence
- 4Satellite damage, GNSS errors and radio blackouts● strong evidence
- 5Duration of a continental-scale outage depends on transformer replacement times◐ moderate evidence
- Carrington event, September 1859.
- Quebec blackout, March 1989: the Hydro-Québec grid collapsed in seconds.
- May 2024: an extreme (G5) storm, the first G5 since 2003, with no grid collapse.
| Source | Statement | Kind |
|---|
| Riley 2012 ↗ | About a 12% chance of a Carrington-class event per decade, from a power-law fit. Later work by Riley and others puts it nearer 10%, and different methods give anywhere from about 1.5% to 85%. | EXPERT ESTIMATE |
|---|
Expert estimates are personal judgements, not measurements, and experts disagree. This site never adds its own probabilities.
Caveat
How bad a storm of this size would be for modern grids is uncertain: operators have improved protections since 1989, but exposure has grown.
- Prepare for a long power cut: radio, light, water, food that needs no cooking, paper maps.
- Do not rely on GPS alone for navigation.
Open the preparedness checklist for this scenario →
- Cliver, E.W. & Dietrich, W.F. (2013). The 1859 space weather event revisited: limits of extreme activity. J. Space Weather Space Clim. 3:A31. link ↗
- Boteler, D.H. (2019). A 21st century view of the March 1989 magnetic storm. Space Weather 17. link ↗
- Riley, P. (2012). On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events. Space Weather 10:S02012. link ↗
- NOAA SWPC: geomagnetic storms and the G scale. link ↗