The Invisible Storm

In the early hours of 2 September 1859, telegraph offices across North America and Europe began sparking, catching fire, and shocking their operators. The cause was a storm — not on Earth, but on the Sun. A billion-tonne cloud of magnetised plasma had crossed 150 million kilometres of space in under eighteen hours and struck our planet's magnetic field with a force that has never been equalled in the modern record. The Carrington Event, as it became known, was a nine-day wonder in its time. In ours, it would be a civilisational emergency.

The Invisible Storm tells the full story of the Sun's most dangerous side — the solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms that have already knocked out power grids, destroyed satellites, blinded GPS systems, and exposed astronauts to life-threatening radiation. Drawing on the latest findings from NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the unprecedented activity of Solar Cycle 25, Marcus Veylan explains the science of space weather from the inside out: how the Sun generates these storms, how they travel across space, how they interact with every piece of technology our civilisation depends on, and what scientists and engineers are doing to forecast and prepare for the next major event.

The storm that struck Québec in 1989 collapsed an entire provincial power grid in ninety seconds, leaving six million people without electricity. A near-miss in July 2012 — a Carrington-class event that missed Earth by nine days — passed almost unnoticed by the general public. The G5 geomagnetic storm of May 2024, the most severe in two decades, produced auroras visible from Florida and Spain while quietly stressing satellite constellations, GPS networks, and power infrastructure across the Northern Hemisphere.

The next Carrington Event is not a question of whether. It is a question of when — and whether we will be ready.

Authoritative, urgent, and compulsively readable, The Invisible Storm is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the greatest natural threat to modern civilisation that almost nobody is talking about.