And all of the events it is being compared about are at least an order of magnitude bigger than the Carrington event. This should not surprise us, by the way.

And all of the events it is being compared about are at least an order of magnitude bigger than the Carrington event. This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc. So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was. All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.