A question about the carrington event of 1859

[Isatsuki San]

the carrington event of 1859 how long did it take to land and what caused the problems with the telerago technology at that time was it due to a radiation storm or the cme that hit?

[Vancanneyt Sander]

Not easy to say because at that time we didn’t have satellites that monitored the Sun. so we didn’t have any x-ray data to determine the strength of the solar flares, we didn’t have LASCO imagery to see how the CME’s propagated through space…

all we had where solar observations through telescopes with sunspot counts, a telescope observation of a so called “white light flare”, and magnetometer readings who caught a sudden impulse of a shock arriving. 

it was a G5 geomagnetic storm, with Aurora all up to very low latitudes. Ground currents caused telegraph poles to caught fire. 

to the fearmongers: technology has advanced, space weather is now closely monitored and precautions have been made to withstand or take precautions with major events to prevent severe damage. The grid is now more protected against ground currents during geomagnetic storming to prevent outages, satellites can be put in safe mode to prevent damage, gps will be meters off point, airtraffic will take precautions, oil industrie will monitor the pipelines for ground currents to prevent damage, and many more precautions.