Skip to main content

Scientists think the next big solar storm could create an ‘internet apocalypse’

The internet isn’t just in the cloud — it’s also at the bottom of the ocean. Your online data is ferried across the world through a crisscrossing network of hundreds of undersea cables, a handful of which are over 12,000 miles long and stretch between continents. In total, there’s approximately 1.3 million miles of subsea internet cable lying at the bottom of the ocean — enough to encircle the globe 52 times. So what happens if a natural disaster damages some of those cables?

According to Dr. Sangeetha Jyothi, a professor at University of California Irvine, such an event could potentially create an “internet apocalypse.” And as if that’s not scary enough by itself, her research also suggests that this frightening scenario could come to pass sometime in the next two decades. She argues that a rare solar superstorm is likely to cripple parts of the global internet infrastructure and cause an outage that could last for months.

But there’s also some good news: We might be able to avoid this disastrous future if we prepare for it properly.

Solar Superstorm Internet Composite Illustration.
Taylor Frint/Digital Trends Graphic

Creating a cosmic catastrophe

The surface of the sun is an extremely volatile place. As it churns and sputters like a vast ocean of white-hot plasma, solar flares often get belched out from the surface, flinging electromagnetic radiation out into space. Thankfully, most of these ejections aren’t a problem for our planet, either because they aren’t big enough to pose a significant threat, or they’re just aimed in the wrong direction. But every so often — roughly once per century or so — we get unlucky, and a particularly big “solar superstorm” erupts in our direction.

Luckily, Earth’s atmosphere deflects and shields most of the radiation created during a solar superstorm, preventing it from harming us. But the accompanying electrically charged matter can interact with the earth’s magnetic field and (in addition to creating stunning auroras) disrupt everything from satellite communications to power grids to — as Jyothi argues — our undersea internet cables.

The likelihood of such an incident is relatively low (1.6% to 12% per decade, to be precise), but there’s also a severe dearth of data on these events, since they rarely occur in a predictable manner that’s easy for scientists to analyze. However, since the last few decades have been relatively quiet, Jyothi’s predictive models suggest we could witness another big solar storm within the next 20 to 25 years.

Solar superstorm concept image.
Solar superstorm concept image NASA

It’s been exactly a century since the last time a significant solar disturbance hit Earth in 1921. Known as the New York Railroad superstorm, it blew electrical fuses and led to widespread outages in railroad and undersea telegraph systems. The upside was that this happened before the advent of modern connectivity, and as a result, the impact on the world was somewhat limited. But if a solar storm of this magnitude were to take place today, scientists estimate that the resulting damage could leave 20 million to 40 million people without electricity for up to two years, and the economic impact could reach trillions of dollars.

More solar storms of much lower intensity have occurred since the last big one in 1921. One of them, in 2003, threw Japan’s space program into disarray. Another, in 1967, nearly started a nuclear war because the United States believed Russia had interfered with its missile detection systems when, in fact, it was caused by a solar shower.

Our delicate worldwide web

So how exactly might these solar superstorms create issues for the modern internet? Undersea internet cables are immune to any electric damage a solar storm could inflict since they shepherd across signals in the form of light, not current. The problem is at the interval of about 30 to 90 miles, where they’re equipped with repeaters to amplify those signals over long distances. These repeaters are vulnerable to electrical disruptions, and if even one of them malfunctions, it could theoretically bring down the entire undersea route.

Marea underwater cable.
MAREA underwater cable. Rabat

Since the modern internet has never been stress-tested for a solar storm, there’s also little data on how these modules might recover. The good news is that it’s unlikely to damage all the submarine cable routes.

The effects of a solar storm will be most prominent closer in regions to the Earth’s magnetic poles. So, for instance, Asia faces less risk since Singapore, a hub for a range of undersea cables that lies at the equator. Therefore, though several regions might not experience a blackout, they could be isolated from continents and countries that do. The U.S., for example, could be disconnected from Europe.

The internet in a disaster

Thankfully, the internet is fundamentally built for resilience. If repeaters do fail, the web is capable of automatically rerouting the traffic through a different, still operational route, says Dr. Umakishore Ramachandran, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

“There is enough redundancy in the core of the network,” Ramachandran told Digital Trends, “that such failures are recognized at the higher levels of the network stack to reroute flows around failed routes.” At most, your internet speeds will decrease due to the spike in congestion, but it’s unlikely “to be catastrophic,” he added.

The bigger cause for concern, says Ross Schulman, a senior technologist at the New America’s Open Technology Institute, is the “edges of the network.” This includes, for instance, the internet connections that we and smaller businesses rely on. If enough routes are damaged, the remaining bandwidth may be restricted to essential services like health care, leaving residential customers in the dark and without digital communications for weeks. Plus, satellite communication and tools like GPS systems will go offline, taking away with them a critical backup in disaster situations.

Undersea internet cable map.
Submarine Cable Map / NA

The world is no stranger to internet outages and blackouts in a natural disaster. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and more have previously plunged cities into darkness for days on end. And just like how people coped during those events, Ramachandran believes edge computing could be the answer in a solar superstorm.

Local, decentralized networks have previously allowed communities to stay in touch and essentially build their own internets to communicate updates. Similar projects could come to the rescue, at least temporarily, in the event of an “internet apocalypse.” However, if this theoretical internet apocalypse were to last for weeks or months, governments would need to turn to other solutions that could restore the global internet, especially in harder-hit areas. When a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Peru’s remote areas, an internet-beaming balloon from Google’s now-defunct Loon division was able to provide service in about 48 hours.

There’s also a real chance that electric grids could go out for weeks, and therefore all our internet infrastructure simply wouldn’t have any power. In such a scenario, Schulman says, “alternative solutions such as wireless meshes like Commotion or Google’s Loon could rise as a flexible alternative.”

Experts fear a solar superstorm is just one of the many natural catastrophes that threaten the internet and the economies dependent upon it. As climate change escalates, Earth is expected to witness a rise in disasters, and preparing for them must be the top priority — a conversation that has yet to enter the mainstream conversation.

“We’ve already seen localized examples of this kind of trouble during Hurricane Sandy in New York, in which many data centers were taken offline, cell phones were out of service, and internet traffic was disrupted,” Schulman added. “Making sure that this infrastructure is resilient against coming changes is important.”

Shubham Agarwal
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Rainbow Six Extraction will turn you into a better squad mate
A squad attacks an alien in Rainbow Six Extraction.

My first Rainbow Six Extraction mission didn’t quite go as planned.

During a demo event, I was paired up with two strangers who would become my close squadmates for nearly four hours. Having completed a solo tutorial with little trouble, I went into our inaugural mission thinking I’d carry my team to victory as a party of one. One swarm of slimy aliens later, I was out of action, cocooned in a sickly yellow shell. My poor teammates had to abort the mission, toss my immobilized body on their shoulders, and extract me to safety. I was quite literally dead weight.

Read more
Everything LG announced for the smart home at CES 2022
LG room interior with sofa and drawer with mockup poster near window.

LG has almost always had a presence in the smart home space, but the company made that clearer than ever before at CES 2022 with a flurry of new smart home devices aimed at improving people's lives. From improving our air quality and turning us into the perfect cooks to adding more settings to washers and dryers, the LG ThinQ app plays a larger role than ever before.
PuriCare AeroTower

The company aims to not only improve your air quality, but also your comfort with the LG PuriCare AeroTower. Not your ordinary air purifier, the PuriCare AeroTower is also a fan and a heater. The model supports three airflow modes (with 10 levels of intensity each): Wide, Diffusion, and Ddirect. Depending on the model, you can add heat (up to 86 degrees Fahrenheit) to any airflow mode. The unit uses multistage True HEPA filters to effectively capture most particles floating around a room. It also uses ultraviolet-C light to help combat bacteria. For those who want to check on the air quality, they can look on the device or check out the LG ThinQ app on their phone.
InstaView Double Oven Range

Read more
Why Matter is the most important smart home trend from CES 2022
A collection of Matter-enabed Amazon devices.

If you've been following our CES 2022 coverage, then you've seen one particular name crop up around almost every smart home announcement: Matter. The Matter movement is built around the concept of a single, unifying standard for smart home devices. It seeks to simplify the operation and setup of the smart home, tearing down the proverbial walled gardens that have risen up in the market.

At the present moment, more than 220 different companies -- including the big three in smart home of Amazon, Google, and Apple -- have all joined the Matter Alliance and pledged their commitment to an open-source approach to development. The number of companies was only 180 in May. In the space of seven months, more than 40 other companies have joined the push. In total, there are more than 2,400 engineers across all these companies working to make the smart home that much smarter. That's a lot of support.

Read more