> Sophie Schmieg is a high-level cryptography/security Googler, and Knows What She’s Talking About. She refers to the Carrington Event, a major solar storm (“Co

> Sophie Schmieg is a high-level cryptography/security Googler, and Knows What She’s Talking About. She refers to the Carrington Event, a major solar storm (“Coronal Mass Ejection” they say) that happened in 1859, and severely disrupted the world’s telegraph system for about eight hours. This is an example of a Solar proton event. If/when one happens, it’s going to seriously suck for astronouts and for anyone who who depends on aerial radio-frequency communications. TL;DR: the data center itself is probably quite safe from whatever the author meant here. This is not entirely correct. The author confuses different things (and misspells the word "astronaut"). * An solar energetic particle event (SEP) is what's the most dangerous thing for astronauts, in part because there's going to be very little advance warning, but also because these high-energy particles can penetrate the inadequate shielding of a spacecraft and fry electronics (physically disrupting microchips) or damage biological tissues. But that's a non-issue for the rest of us: ground-level enhancements due to SEP events are rare. * Carrington event's main source was a (probably double) coronal mass ejection, or a CME. This is a different phenomenon from an SEP. You can think of it this way: a CME is like a dam breaking down and you getting flooded by huge amounts of relatively slowly moving water masses, while an SEP is like getting shot at by a water cannon accelerating a relatively tiny stream to supersonic speeds. But the thing is that the particles in the CME again do not penetrate the magnetosphere and reach the atmosphere directly. Rather, the increased pressure of the solar wind causes changes in the magnetosphere's shape, which (a) "squeezes" field lines to lower latitudes, (b) causes something called "reconnection" in the magnetosphere tail, essentially slinging particles coasting along on the magnetic field lines in the tail back to the Earth (and causing auroras as they slam in the atmosphere), and (c) strengthens the ring current, which causes depression in the magnetic field, and this (changing magnetic field) in turn induces substantial currents in extended conductors such as telegraph lines or metal pipelines. But I imagine that this is going to be harmless to electronics, the main vulnerability is actually power lines feeding the data centers: volatility of magnetic field during even the biggest storms is on the order of several hundred nanoTeslas. Source: am a space scientist.