The Science behind Blackout

Today, my grandmother remarked to my mom, "Is it okay that I don't understand what Eric is writing about?"  This brought to my attention how obscure the whole topic of Coronal Mass Ejections is.  As such, I will try to explain it as best I can.


A Coronal Mass Ejection is, for all intents and purposes, a massive Solar Flare.  The difference here being that the average Solar Flare is a relatively small event (the average size is roughly that of the Moon) whereas a Coronal Mass Ejection is results in a mass up to a quarter the size of the sun lifting off and flinging itself through space at a very high percentage of the speed of light.

This is about the only thing Nicholas Cage's movie Knowing got right.

While a CME does contain a massive amount of energy, by the time it reaches the Earth it covers an area roughly twelve times the size of the Sun.  As a CME is a large cloud of charged plasma, the Earth's Geomagnetic field (generated by the rotating core of liquid Iron), is usually able to deflect it away from the planet successfully.

However, this peels back layers of the field and forces them to stream out behind the Earth.  As they are stripped back, large amounts of charged particles follow them down through the gaps at the North and South pole.  This is what causes the Northern and Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis and Auror Australialis).  During a CME however, the amount of charged particles which are able to enter the atmosphere and affect our planet.

During a borderline CME in March of 1989, charged particles knocked out power to the city of Quebec for 9 hours.  The sheer amount of static electricity in the atmosphere caused a transformer sub-station to explode.

During a large CME similar to the one which struck in 1859, the sheer amount of energy in the atmosphere would be attracted to the power grid like an antennae and would cause the entire global power grid to shut down.  With enough warning, portions of the grid would be able to shut down their systems in time to prevent a total loss of the electrical infrastructure, but it would still take close to a decade to get the rest of the system back up and running.

If the damage was complete, as it is in my novel, it is doubtful the national grid would ever be recoverable.  Estimates show that, with no societal collapse and all available energy resources supplying the production of transformer sub-stations, it would take a minimum of 10 years to rebuild every transformer in the network.

As civilization is only nine meals deep, this is not only highly unlikely, it is downright implausible.  The good news is that we are only in danger for another 20 years or so.  The bad news is that we are currently entering a Solar Maximum (an anemic one similar to the Maunder Minimum granted, but for the sake of a good story, pretend its a bigger one), with a second one coming in eleven years.

Fingers crossed!