How Solar Storms Could Leave You Stranded and in the Dark

You reach for your phone and it’s a brick. The GPS spins and never settles on where you are. The lights flicker once, then quit, and so does the whole block. That’s how solar storms could leave you stranded and in the dark, and the first suspects are always the boring ones: a dead battery, a flaky router, the utility company dropping the ball. Every so often, though, the real culprit is sitting 93 million miles away, having a very bad day.

Here’s the direct answer: an intense solar storm flings charged particles at Earth that scramble the upper atmosphere your GPS relies on, while the same magnetic jolt can force damaging currents into the power grid. Navigation drifts, transformers overheat, and a whole region’s lights can go out. It has happened before, and it will again.

So what actually breaks, and how worried should you be? Start with what the Sun is actually throwing at you, then follow it down to ground level.

When the Sun Throws a Cosmic Tantrum

Our Sun looks placid from a porch chair. Most days it is. But every so often it throws one of its cosmic tantrums, either a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection (a CME), which is a cloud of magnetized plasma the Sun heaves off like a sneeze the size of a planet. A fast CME can carry a billion tons of charged particles toward Earth at several million miles per hour, according to NASA.1 (A billion tons is the part that sounds made up, and isn’t.) Solar flares add a separate punch of radiation that arrives in about eight minutes, flat out at the speed of light, which is exactly the trip ordinary sunlight makes to reach you (NASA’s number).9

A CME’s travel time runs the gamut. A slow one ambles in over two or three days; a fast one can be knocking on the door in fifteen to eighteen hours, according to NOAA.8 That is not a lot of warning, if nobody is watching the Sun for you.

How the Sun Reaches Into Your Daily Life

So how does weather on the Sun reach into your Tuesday? Mostly through the ionosphere, a layer of electrically charged gas high overhead that your signals bounce off and pass through.

Stir up the ionosphere and GPS gets confused. Your receiver pins your location by timing signals from satellites, and a disturbed ionosphere throws that timing off. Not by much. But GPS lives on “not by much.” During a severe storm, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center says position errors can grow from a few feet to tens of meters.2 For finding a new restaurant, annoying. For landing a jet or threading a cargo ship into a harbor, a genuine problem.

Aviation feels it first. A study in Scientific Reports tracked roughly four million flights and found that during space weather events, average arrival delays climbed about 81%, with the authors pinning it on degraded communication and navigation (Wang et al., 2023).3

The poles are worse. A solar radiation storm can black out the high-frequency radio that long-haul flights depend on up there, so airlines reroute polar flights south to keep those links alive, according to NOAA.4 The shorter route gets longer, and your connection in Chicago gets missed, all because of something that happened on the Sun.

The Power Grid Is the Sun’s Favorite Target

The Sun’s favorite target hums behind your wall outlet. When a geomagnetic storm rattles Earth’s magnetic field, it induces stray electrical currents in long conductors like high-voltage transmission lines (the official name, geomagnetically induced currents, is uglier than the idea). Those currents pour into transformers that were never designed to handle them, and the transformers can overheat and fail, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.5

This is not a thought experiment. In March 1989 a solar storm drove currents into Québec’s grid and collapsed the whole thing in about ninety seconds, leaving roughly six million people without power on a winter morning, for about nine hours, and a transformer down in New Jersey cooked in the same storm.6 We walk through that night, and what a bigger one could do, in How Solar Weather Could Paralyze Our Power Grid.

A long blackout reaches past dark rooms. The fridge that keeps your food and your insulin cold goes quiet, and the water pressure fades once the pumps lose power. None of that is a reason to dread the sky, though. It’s the same logic as the flashlight you keep in a kitchen drawer: a day’s notice and a couple of small habits turn a real scramble into a slow, slightly boring afternoon. The lights are just the part you notice first.

What a Major Solar Storm Would Actually Cost

Forecasters grade space weather on three scales: R for radio blackouts, S for radiation storms, G for geomagnetic storms, each running 1 to 5, the way you’d read a hurricane category. The top grades are rare. They’re also the ones worth planning around.

How expensive does the top of the scale get? Not the everyday storm. The rare monster, a once-in-a-century event on the scale of the 1859 Carrington storm. For an extreme like that, a National Research Council workshop report estimated the economic hit could reach $1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year, with full recovery taking four to ten years (National Research Council, 2008).7 That long tail is the real lesson. The flare itself lasts minutes. Replacing a fleet of giant, custom-built transformers (and nobody keeps many spares lying around) takes years.

You can’t out-argue the Sun, but you can get a head start

You’re not going to talk the Sun out of its next tantrum. You can stop it from catching you flat-footed. Now you know how solar storms could leave you stranded and in the dark, and the fix is almost boring: a day or two of warning is plenty, so charge the power banks, top off the tank, pull a little cash, and stash paper directions in the glovebox for the day the GPS goes loopy. The whole trick is getting that day or two of warning, which only helps if the alert reaches you before the grid does, not after. That’s the one thing we built FlareAware to do: when a storm has your region in its path, you hear about it while there’s still time to fill the tank. Subscribe to FlareAware today, and the next time the block goes dark, you’ll be the one who saw it coming.

One honest note. This article is general information for preparedness, not professional or medical advice, and a blackout never changes what counts as an emergency. If you or someone near you has a medical crisis, chest pain that could be a heart attack, trouble breathing, the sudden droop or slurring of a stroke, call 911 (or your local emergency number) right away, power or no power.

References

  1. NASA. What Is a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME? National Aeronautics and Space Administration. nasa.gov – Back to text

  2. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Space Weather and GPS Systems. NOAA/NWS. swpc.noaa.gov – Back to text

  3. Wang Y, Xu XH, Wei FS, Feng XS, et al. Additional flight delays and magnetospheric-ionospheric disturbances during solar storms. Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 24;13(1):3246. PMID: 36828884. PubMed – Back to text

  4. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Solar Radiation Storms (Space Weather Phenomena). NOAA/NWS. swpc.noaa.gov – Back to text

  5. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Electric Power Transmission. NOAA/NWS. swpc.noaa.gov – Back to text

  6. Boteler DH. A 21st Century View of the March 1989 Magnetic Storm. Space Weather. 2019;17(10):1427–1441. doi:10.1029/2019SW002278. doi.org – Back to text

  7. National Research Council. Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts: A Workshop Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2008. National Academies Press – Back to text

  8. NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. Coronal Mass Ejections (Space Weather Phenomena). NOAA/NWS. spaceweather.gov – Back to text

  9. NASA / RHESSI. The Solar FAQ. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov – Back to text