Aurora by David Koepp
The Carrington Event
On September 1, 1859, a giant cloud of solar plasma drenched with magnetic field lines, brewed deep inside the sun’s convective zone, erupted from the corona and burst free of the star’s gravitational pull. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is in itself no big solar news—typically, the sun belches out three or four of them per earth day at the peak of its activity cycle. But on that day in 1859, the dense gaseous cloud of the CME was significantly greater than usual, about the total mass of Mount Everest, and the angle of its inflection happened to target it perfectly toward the earth. The resulting electromagnetic chaos would come to be known as the Carrington Event, named after the British astronomer who witnessed it.
Traveling at six million miles per hour, the solar energy breached the earth’s magnetosphere seventeen hours after eruption, enveloping the planet in electrical current. Telegraph operators across the globe reported streams of fire bursting from their signal boards, platinum relay switches melted, and, around the world, there were reports that the night skies lit up as in daytime. The swirling magnetic displays of the northern lights were visible as far south as Cuba and Jamaica, the southern lights as far north as Colombia.
Thankfully, in 1859, telegraph systems were the only significant electrical networks in operation anywhere and could be repaired within a few days. For the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants, life immediately went back to normal, and the Carrington Event did little more than enliven the last few humdrum days of summer.
Twenty-three years later, on September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison would turn on the generators at Pearl Street Station, in Lower Manhattan, activating America’s first power grid. Human beings were on the path to total electrical addiction.
A major CME hits the earth full force, on average, every hundred and fifty years.
We are overdue.
Part I
Onset
1.
Aurora, Illinois
6:32 a.m., Tuesday, April 14
The thing about Norman Levy was that everyone knew Norman Levy. As a college professor at the University of Chicago, he’d been a magnetic force for talented and curious people and could always spot a kindred spirit when he saw one. Students who’d never quite fit in anywhere felt utterly at home in the professor’s cramped college office, or over dinners and coffees and drinks at his wood-frame house near the end of Cayuga Lane, in nearby Aurora. Norman, a solar scientist, had dedicated his entire professional life to the study of the sun, but his real and abiding interest was in people. A childless widower, he collected friends the way some people collect butterflies, but not to press them into a book; no, he wanted to prod and question and provoke them, to talk to them. There was, he was certain, absolutely nothing more worth doing than talking to people.
But not at 6:32 a.m. Central Standard Time, which was the exact moment when the phone on the wall in his kitchen rang on Tuesday, April 14. Norman, standing at the sink and staring out the window while the coffee brewed, stirred himself from his pre-caffeine reverie and scowled at the phone. A line from a movie ran uselessly through his head—“None of my friends would call at this hour”—which was a lie. His friends called all the time, it was the curse of knowing people in myriad time zones. Norman shuffled over to the phone, tilted his glasses up so he could read the caller ID, and saw SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND. He picked up the handset.
“We’ve talked about this,” Norman said.
The voice from the other end was tense and excited. “Did you see any imaging from GOES-16 in the past twenty-four hours?”
“It’s six-thirty in the morning here, kiddo.”
“And I’m calling you anyway, Norman. So, imagine.”
Norman could hear the urgency in Perry St. John’s voice, and he cleared his throat, pulling himself to attention. He liked Perry and had since the moment the kid walked into his Introduction to Astrophysics class, listened to one lecture, then went right up to the revered professor and announced that he was looking for a mentor and had just settled on Norman. Who could resist that kind of chutzpah? Twenty years of dinners and phone calls and e-mails after that first day in class, Perry was one of the lead researchers at NOAA’s main observation station monitoring solar events. He put up with the lily-white astronomic industry giving him second looks and suspicious glances and, boy, did he get tired of saying, “Yes, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a great inspiration to me.” But he stayed with it, even when they started pushing him into media interviews just so they could have a Black face out there, because it was the job he was born to do. He liked to tell people he was a weatherman, which was technically true, but the kind of storms he monitored made category 5 earth hurricanes look like spring showers.
He repeated his question to Norman. “Have you seen imaging from the past cycle?”
“Last night,” Norman said, “and thank you again for the login. Hours of fun. Hours, Perry.”
“Did you see the flare?”
“Yes. Two of ’em, big ones. SUVI picked it up. They saturated the X-ray irradiance sensors, so I haven’t checked back. Why?”
Perry paused on the other end, thinking. “Is it possible they masked a secondary burst? Or tertiary?”
Norman furrowed his brow. “I suppose. Did the radiation hit DSCOVR yet?”