Are we ready for a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event?

In 1859, two English astronomers (Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson) independently witnessed a major solar flare while they were observing the Sun. 18 hours later, aurorae were seen lighting up the night skies across the world – from Paris and Rome to Cuba. The entire telegraph network collapsed for days. The world was struggling to figure out what was going on.

Last year, the world had a slight reminder of this 1859 “Carrington Event” when a large solar flare and accompanying coronal mass ejection (CME) led to a major geomagnetic storm in May 2024. In our latest peer-reviewed paper (published in the journal, Space Weather), we show that the May 2024 solar flares were the largest since at least 1937.

But, last year’s flares were still just a whimper compared to the 1859 Carrington event – the world hasn’t experienced one of that magnitude since then. We know that solar storms can wreak havoc on satellites, electricity networks and communication systems. But, none of those things were around in 1859.

So, in this video, I ask “are we prepared for another Carrington event?”

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⭐Note: Coincidentally, a week after this video was recorded on 5 November, a series of 3 CMEs led to more low-latitude aurorae on 11-12 November 2025. Although our paper was submitted for peer review on 5 May 2025 and so only covers the period up to 2024, we had suggested in our paper that further events like this would be possible as we are still experiencing the solar maximum of Solar Cycle 25:
"The current solar cycle maximum may extend past 2025 (Velasco Herrera et al., 2021). Therefore, it is possible that aurorae could again be observed at low latitudes, similar to those seen in May and October 2024, during the rest of the maximum of Solar Cycle 25." (Velasco Herrera et al., 2025, p31).

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Link to the study:
🔹 V. M. Velasco Herrera, W. Soon, S. Knoška, A. Özgüç, et al. (2025). Solar flare activity, 1937–2024: Introducing the new hemispheric Solar Flare Index (hSFI) in the context of 2024's major solar storm events. Space Weather, 23, e2025SW004515. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025SW004515.

Links to the dataset:
🔹 Velasco Herrera, V. (2025a). Solar flare activity, 1937‐2024: Introducing the new hemispheric solar flare index (hsfi) in the context of 2024’s major solar storm events. Harvard Dataverse.
• Total solar flare index (SFI): https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/9TILW5
• Northern hemisphere index (nhSFI). https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TSQEPB
• Southern hemisphere index (shSFI). https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/C1L8ZX

Other relevant links:
🔹 Stuart Clark – “The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began” (2007). https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Kings-Unexpected-Carrington-Astronomy-ebook/dp/B081KBZ64P/
🔹 The SWORM group that is the US government’s organization investigating how to prepare for extreme space weather events: https://www.sworm.gov/about.htm

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Chapters:
00:00 Our new solar flare paper
01:22 Who was Richard Carrington?
03:27 The Carrington-Hodgson event
05:25 Global craziness in the days after the 1859 flare
07:18 What we now know about the links between solar flares & geomagnetic storms
09:31 When is a repeat of the 1859 Carrington event due? Were the May 2024 solar storms similar?
11:45 Are we prepared for another Carrington event?

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