Before you panic, please check spaceweather.com to see how this is not anything to panic about.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Well that’s a disappointment
Can these storms permanently damage space craft and satellites?
Yes but they would have to be much stronger. The “Carrington Event”, for example was like X45, this one is X1.9.
Whereas the Kerrigan event was a solid 5.8, IIRC.
I spent way too long trying to figure this comment out
"Dad joke" + Blue Dream = 🤷🏼♂️😅🤪🤓
Not the one coming. It'll just be pretty lights.
Not milsats, as they're shielded.
even milsats are engineered to presume that the Van Allen Belts are still there.
However, as the Earth's geomagnetic pole-flip progresses ( it isn't steady, it's behavior is rather "quantum", so it'll hold 1 speed for awhile, then suddenly change-speed, as it did a few years ago..
The current north-pole is now heading, iirc, towards Russia )
the Van Allen Belts can .. disappear.
The greatest pole-swing I saw on the maps of ( fossilized ) previous-flips, showed about 30-degrees of swing in a single year.
We're nowhere-near that level, yet, but the standard presumption that "it won't happen" .. isn't as solidly-based as it would appear.
No Van Allen Belts would likely remove ALL our satellites, rather quickly.
As would any Carrington event, if it kept happening sooo long that it got all the geosynchronous satellites.
Shielding has limits.
Engineer for the wrong limits, like all the ocean-ships engineered on the presumption that the max wave they'd ever face would be 40-feet high, then the EU's satellite discovered that there really is an 80-foot wave roughly every day, & you're murdering engineered-potential, & lives, simply by denying just how real Nature can be.
Which is normal.
All the engineering ( chemical included ) which presumes everything's going to be fine, no testing needed..
it's all on the same paradigm.
"That can't happen" .. "protects", just like it did the shuttle that Feynman chewed-out NASA for..
Oh, there's this, too:
What happens when even 20% of the satellites up there are permafritzed, by space weather?
They're now uncontrolled shrapnel, so they don't evade each-other's orbits, anymore, right?
Kessler Syndrome lies that way, & even if a satellite survived the radiation, .. shrapnel's kinda fatal, at space's collision-speeds.
_ /\ _
Also big correlation to earthquake I believe.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67860-3
Large earthquakes occurring worldwide have long been recognized to be non Poisson distributed, so involving some large scale correlation mechanism, which could be internal or external to the Earth. Till now, no statistically significant correlation of the global seismicity with one of the possible mechanisms has been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we analyze 20 years of proton density and velocity data, as recorded by the SOHO satellite, and the worldwide seismicity in the corresponding period, as reported by the ISC-GEM catalogue. We found clear correlation between proton density and the occurrence of large earthquakes (M > 5.6), with a time shift of one day. The significance of such correlation is very high, with probability to be wrong lower than 10 –5. the correlation increases with the magnitude threshold of the seismic catalogue. A tentative model explaining such a correlation is also proposed, in terms of the reverse piezoelectric effect induced by the applied electric field related to the proton density. This result opens new perspectives in seismological interpretations, as well as in earthquake forecast.
It kind of makes sense, there's a large mass of charged particles being deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, so there must be some kind of corresponding force applied back to the field/the dynamo generating it. Interesting that the leading hypothesis is that it manifests piezoelectrically in rock.
Yeah I found the fact that its basically the piezoelectric effect (in reverse of how I'm used to thinking about it) at a massive scale, to be fascinating. I've always been interested in those fans you put on wood burning stoves, which take some heat energy to spin a fan.
What are the quantitative forces of a CME versus the Earth's fields? I feel like any regular charged particle emissions from the sun would be far weaker than a planetary electromagnetic field, especially in terms of induction.
I suspect that the electrical-force would be .. insane, given that Quebec Hydro kept having their grid getting millions of volts, from aurora ( popping their systems )..
& if you've got wet, fractured tectonic-plates, with some fault-zones near-release,
& then you put a gentle, but IMMENSE geographically, force on them .. then the statistical likelihood of stress-release would go up..
I'm not presuming piezo, but I'm not saying that's wrong, either..
I'm just saying that electric-fields have proven, in space, to reach WAAAY farther than we assumed..
& if we were getting that wrong, then we may be getting it wrong in the Earth, too..
The primary force would be electric, since it's from positive & negative plasma being pulled to different locations on Earth..
& then it should all come down to how-sensitive-the-balance-is, among the tectonic faults, & how that electric current affects those zones, including how it flows through mineralized-water..
( that 24h-delay means something: there's some process which takes that long, for it to tip the balance.. )
_ /\ _
There's an app for that, and it's called Carrington.
Yup there it is
Kinda unnerving though relatively common I guess
I mean we’re in “solar maximum”, so no real surprises. We’ve only been able to closely monitor solar activity for a few decades though.
I’ve heard it described as like a sun burping.
EDIT: To be clear, I am referencing a scene from Star Trek: Discovery.
for those acronymically challenged:
“A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a significant ejection of plasma mass from the Sun's corona into the heliosphere. CMEs are often associated with solar flares and other forms of solar activity, but a broadly accepted theoretical understanding of these relationships has not been established.”
—Wikipedia