this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Nope, that wasn't remotely powerful enough to be compared to Carrington.
For such an event, we'd have to take preemptive measures to protect our power grids by mostly shutting then down and cutting various interconnects temporarily until the danger had passed, for example.
That’s just false. The carrington event happened due to a sun spot on the sun’s equator. Last week’s was far further down, and was classified as “the strongest geomagnetic storm since 2003”. The CME from the carrington event was fired out of the sun on the solar plane, directly at the earth, while last week the CME was vaguely in our direction, but well below our orbit. The sun is a ball, not a flat disc, and it didn’t somehow steer the ejection toward us out of a sense of malice. The carrington event produced currents in static wire that were sufficient to set telegraph stations on fire. That would have tripped every breaker in the power grid, you can’t “harden” against that level of induction. It’s like saying that a practice amp and a Marshall plexi are the same volume because they both go up to ten on their volume knob. All you, and the pillock in that video, are saying is that you don’t understand the mechanism behind that number
Edit: adding a reference. The following article spells it out pretty damn well, written by someone who actually understands the subject - https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-large-solar-storm-could-knock-out-the-internet-and-power-grid-an-electrical-engineer-explains-how/
Goddamn, you fucking killed him dude.
That was pretty epic, ngl.