Dangers Of Extreme Solar Storm, Can Damage Electricity And Satellite Networks

Illustration of extreme solar storms (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA Extreme solar storms can have a huge impact on humans. One of the serious impacts that occurred was the Carrington incident, the breakdown of the electricity, causing a fire.

Despite the enormous impact, Carrington events are not the strongest hurricane ever recorded in history. The study released by scientists in Nature, citing Sciencealert, shows that Earth has faced much more extreme solar storms.

Evidence of the occurrence of this storm was discovered thanks to radiocarbon analysis, another designation of carbon-14 dating, in a tree circle. Analysis using radiocarbons has been used for decades to determine the lifetimes of pre-living objects.

When plants or animals have died, the radiocarbons in them will rot as well. When observing objects that have lived, scientists will find out how long the radiocarbons are left to estimate how long the organisms have died.

Extreme solar storms not only affect the electric waves on Earth, but also affect the amount of radiocarbon absorbed into living organisms. Therefore, scientists can study the impact of solar storms by observing trees.

In radiocarbon records, the most extreme solar storms occurred about 14,370 years ago or towards the end of the last ice age. The threat from this storm is enormous, which is to bring down the entire power grid, including a fleet of satellites that are not protected by geomagnetic terrain.

Not only disrupting satellite performance, extreme solar storms are expected to damage the entire satellite and cripple communications networks around the world. Before this happened in the future, scientists were looking for ways to minimize its impact.

To date, scientists' knowledge is still very limited on the timing and impact of extreme solar storms. They have not been able to make predictions regarding when these major events will occur in the future.