When Nature Gets Nasty

Or: How to Survive a Geomagnetic Apocalypse

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Also, though I normally disdain trigger warnings, I should warn you that this topic gets very heavy, and includes a dispassionate discussion of suicide. There will be another warning on that section.

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My mountain was treated to something glorious on the night of May 11^th. Neon rainbows filled the sky all the way around the horizon. I’ve not lived in the far north long, but it has been just long enough that I’ve seen a few solar storms.

I never saw anything like this.

For those of you not in the know, what you’re seeing is what happens when the sun has one of its periodic tantrums and throws a chunk of itself out into space. The chunk collides with Earth. Then, in the same way that electricity passing through a tube lights up a florescent or neon bulb by making the gasses in the tube glow, the electrically-charged particles coming off the sun make the nitrogen, oxygen, and other elements in the atmosphere glow when they bounce off our planet’s magnetic field.

We call these light shows “auroras.”

As the storm continued and intensified, and I was nearly losing myself in the beauty of the storm, the glow cast by the Earth’s magnetic lines seemed to tie itself in knots right above me.

Which I thought was odd, as I had thought it was only supposed to happen at the magnetic North Pole, and I don’t live anywhere near magnetic north.

After doing some research, I discovered that the pole had not actually shifted to over my house. Instead, what you see in that picture is of a so-called “coronal aurora,” which is what you see when you’re standing right under a point where the sun’s ejected mass is hitting the Earth’s magnetic field.

Nonetheless, the misunderstanding—which briefly made me wonder if I was actually standing at Magnetic North—sent me down a research rabbit hole which led me some interesting, terrifying places (and furnished considerable material for this column).

And oh boy, it was a doozy!

The Storm of the Century (at least so far)

As I watched the coronal aurora above me, I remembered:

Forecasts had said this storm was a big one, and had a small chance of being the big one that turns the lights off on planet Earth forever. I ducked into my office for a moment to check the intensity on the NOAA site.

The internet and power still worked, so that was something.

I found the NOAA site, and, sure enough, we were at or near “Carrington Event” levels of geomagnetic disruption (see below). That’s enough radiation to seriously damage our technological civilization. But, since there was nothing I could do about it, I relaxed and enjoyed the show, and wondered idly if I was watching the end of the world.

The world didn’t end of course, and thank fuck for that, because although I am more prepared for that than most people, I’m still a good ways away from being truly ready.

Back when tractors didn’t need the Internet…

Not that our civilization came through unscathed. We did take a few worrying hits.

GPS satellites took a hell of a pummeling, for example, which forced John Deere issued a statement advising customers not to use their self-guiding tractors until the storm fast and any needed repairs could be made. Had the storm been just a little worse, planting season would have been disrupted across the northern hemisphere, making for a belt-tightening winter.

A whole raft of other technological problems also developed (disruptions of the UHF and VHF radio bands, compass malfunctions in sub-sea observatories operated by the University of Victoria, drone disruptions, weather satellite disruptions, and Starlink service disruptions).

But none of it kept us down for long.

We dodged a big bullet that night—two of them in fact. A larger solar storm, one which could actually have taken a lot of our infrastructure down, missed the Earth by a comfortable margin a few days later.

Like happens so often, we got lucky.

But since all luck eventually runs out, I’m going to take a look in this article at what it will mean when our luck does run out, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Apocalypse 2: Electric Boogaloo

In my essay A Brief, Bright Fire in the Dark, I talked about the often-unacknowledged realities of nuclear war and the dangers they present. In that essay, among other things, I discussed the danger posed to North America by a single, properly placed thermonuclear detonation:

The Electromagnetic Pulse.

When a nuclear weapon detonates, it sends out a concentrated front of charged particles. Those particles can induce a current in any conductive material (aluminum, copper, steel, gold, etc.). If a high-yield nuclear device were to detonate about fifty miles above South Dakota, the EMP would knock out most of the electronics and overload most of the electrical grids in North America. Transistors would pop, transformers would explode, and every unshielded electronic device within the blast radius would fry more-or-less instantly. Anything that relied on grid power would be down for days-to-weeks. Your car—if it runs on a computer (as does any fuel-injected vehicle sold in the US after 1985)—would be a heavy rolling paperweight.

When Ukraine hotted up two years ago, we entered a very vulnerable period where nuclear war is suddenly back on the table as a live possibility—a heightened danger that has not yet abated, and will not abate, until that war ends (assuming it ends without a nuclear exchange provoked by NATO forces invading Russia). If you’ve been wondering why America doesn’t just go in and kick ass, this is why.¹ All players know that a full-blown nuclear exchange isn’t needed to take the US out of the equation—thanks to our environmental laws (such as the CAFE standards) and aging electrical infrastructure, a single high-altitude missile will do the trick, and might do it before the US can launch a retaliatory strike. Russia, by contrast, has more primitive infrastructure and vehicles and so is far less vulnerable to this endgame. This is the Sword of Damocles they dangle over our head in any international confrontation.

There is some good news on this front, though, which you can piece together if you know enough people with access to enough classified information that you can chart an outline with their denials and decline-to-speak responses.²

I’ve been following the EMP danger since the 1990s, and one thing is clear:

In terms of national power and communications, as well as military infrastructure, we are not as vulnerable to EMP as we are supposed to be. A non-trivial amount of funds (I assume off-the-books as well as on-the-books) since 9/11 have gone towards gradual hardening of the various power grids in the United States (there are three major ones), communications infrastructure, and at least some of our military equipment. Hobbyists and obsessives have also found tricks to future-proof their vehicles.³ As near as I can piece together as a civilian without clearance, from my research and from talking to people with clearance and paying close attention to what they can’t talk about, I am reasonably confident that an EMP attack will only partially disable the United States. Things would be rough, but not necessarily civilization-endingly rough.

So, back to our main topic…

When the sun flings a chunk of itself at Earth and produces those auroras so many of us were marveling over in May, it is basically hitting us with an EMP—one high up enough that it impacts the whole Earth.

The problem is that the sun is capable of hitting us much harder than a nuclear weapon is.

The Civilizational Kill Shot

We’ve been here before. On September 1-2 of 1859, the Earth was struck by a massive geomagnetic storm known as the Carrington Event (so named for Robert Carrington, the scientist who described what was happening). The radiation was so intense that it induced current in telegraph wires, allowing them to operate without power, setting the paper in telegraph offices on fire, severely shocking telegraph operators, and causing transformers and capacitors to explode. It was a big deal, but it amounted to little more than a major inconvenience in a civilization not yet dependent upon electrical technology.

As near as I can deduce from publicly-available sources, the geomagnetic storms of May 2024 hit us on the surface about as hard as did the Carrington Event. We’re still here, and this is good evidence that our modern infrastructure is at least moderately robust.

That’s the first bit of good news.

Here’s the first bit of bad news:

Remember how I said that, during the storm, I thought I might be standing directly under the magnetic North Pole? I wasn’t, it turns out, but the Earth’s magnetic field is shifting rapidly and has been for several years now.

Magnetic north only wanders as far and fast as it has been when the Earth’s magnetic field is destabilizing in advance of a magnetic pole reversal. At such times, our electromagnetic shield is exceptionally weak, which means that when we get hit by moderately-severe solar storms, we get very severe geomagnetic events.

The solar storm that hit us that night was far weaker than the one that caused the Carrington Event.

And, since we’re now in the early seasons of a peak sunspot cycle, we could be in for much worse.

How much worse?

If a solar storm not much more intense than the one which caused the Carrington Event hit us, the electrical transformers in the grid might not just blow up...the power lines themselves might melt.

Replacing the transformers if they all blew is a huge task, but it’s not impossible to accomplish over the course of a few months if it was a matter of national defense.

Replacing the billions of miles of aluminum and copper wire that brings power to all of our homes and businesses is another matter: not just a big deal, but literally impossible on less than a multi-decadal time scale.

First, you have to mine the ore.

Then you have to ship it to the smelters.

Then you have to manufacture the wire.

Then, and only then, can you start installing it.

All in a situation where the mining equipment’s ECUs (Engine Control Units), the smelting control systems, the communication equipment, and the satellites that orbit us have all, also, been fried.

Everything in your life—from the food you eat, to the water you drink, to the products you use every day—depends on the uninterrupted flow of electricity over power lines. Remove that, and the lights go out for decades.

It is what geomagnetic scientists call a “Civilizational Kill Shot” because it will end technological civilization. The light of humanity will remain stuck on this tiny blue marble lost in the void, without the technology to reach back into space...maybe for good.

Maybe.

So what does this mean for all of us who live on this fragile little planet?

Gauging the Danger and Coping With the Aftermath

Will we actually get hit? It’s hard for a layman to know who to believe, but my best guess (which admittedly emerges from a startling level of ignorance) is that we’ve got about a 50% chance of dodging the bullet this century.

If we do get hit, it’ll come soon-ish. We’re in the peak of the danger zone for the next 15 years—the same time window in which we’re at a zenith or nadir for every macro-cycle from the natural to the civilizational to the demographic (talk about the Era of the Jackpot!).

So let’s spin the scenario. What does life look like if we do get hit?

When you’re talking about any major natural disaster in North America, the aftermath timeline looks like this:

• During the first few days, people’s personal psychological bubble will remain intact:
  The cavalry is coming, all we gotta do is hunker down.
  “It’s all gonna be fine,” so don’t do anything rash.
  Maybe I should go to the store and stock up on essentials, especially bottled water. After all—all of our water infrastructure works on electric pumping, flow control, and purification. The water will run out between a few hours and a few days after everything goes boom.

• After about four days, things turn bad. Somewhere between four and eight days, people in urban centers will start dying of thirst. Food in these environments will run out too. People in rural areas who rely on well water are actually worse off—their water stops immediately unless they have on-site storage tanks, ponds, and/or rain catchment systems.
  This is when people will start freaking out, getting desperate, and looking enviously at their neighbors.
  This is also the window in big cities when the food runs out.
  People will begin to flee the cities—which are by now denuded of supplies—for parts rural. The immediate outlying areas will see a lot of violence during this window as locals band together to defend themselves against the invaders. Rural areas further out will do pretty well, as long as they have access to water.

• In the second-through-fifth weeks, people will go off their meds, and those who are prone to crazy behavior without their chemical restraints will start acting out, adding a major element of chaos to the mix.

• From weeks four-through-ten, you will see aggressive raiding parties forming wherever they can find enough fuel to sustain themselves.

• After week ten, the gasoline supplies turn sour (ethanol-treated gas degrades fast, and has no shelf life), so mobility gradually dries up as their cars stop burning the fuel in the tank. Nobody can drive anywhere except for those in a very special class (see next bullet point). After this point, a lot of the immediate chaos abates, and people start to settle in for long-haul survival.

• By the end of the first winter, much of the wild game in many areas will be hunted out, and even those humans who can survive on bare land will start starving unless they are also expert foragers. People who are able to farm without power—or who are able to generate their own power and/or fuel—will be well-fixed for the long term and will begin to form the new power base of society. Cannibalism will make a comeback, at least for a little while.

In a Geomagnetic Kill Shot scenario, somewhere between a third and two thirds of the population of the continent will die (the rest of the wold will be in a similar fix).

In any other major natural disaster, being near a port city is your best bet—aide will come in on ships. In an Electrical Apocalypse, the best-placed are those who live near rivers (with their ready supply of water and power and cheap transport for trade) and oceans (with their ready—and nearly inexhaustible—supply of food). The biggest fast die-offs will happen in urban areas (including coastal cities) due to starvation, violence, and disease.

Two years after the apocalypse, on the other hand, these big cities will be prime areas for re-colonization, due to the amazing amounts of salvage and the ready access to large bodies of water (at least when those bodies are not hopelessly polluted).

Other areas in North America that are away from rivers which will see the most difficult and death-prone conditions are the American West and Southwest (both regions relying as they do on pumped water in a desert. These deaths will, like those in city centers, be relatively rapid), and the American Midwest and Plains (as so much of their water supply relies on well water pumped from deep aquifers).

Pretty grim, right?

But there are some bright points.

There are some places where people will do relatively well. The Pacific Northwest, Appalachia, and the California Coast will all be in pretty good shape, and will be well able to support their depleted population numbers.

The extreme Northeast—so long as people can gather enough wood to stay warm in the winter—will also do well due in no small part to its forbidding climate. Anywhere that gets a lot of snow doesn’t have to worry about water for fully half of the year, which gives survivors a lot of latitude to figure out what to do about food (a non-obese person can survive in relative misery for a couple months without food, but only three days without water. Fat people need more water, but also last longer in starvation conditions, which is why we’ve evolved to gain weight so easily).

Ranchlands will do well with reduced herds scaled to water availability—traveling bands of shepherds and cattlemen—and herds of Bison—will roam the West once again.

The Bayou regions of the American South will also do pretty damn well in material terms, excepting the disease burden, which will be a big problem for a generation or two until everyone acquires enough immunity to the semi-tropical illnesses.

The railways will probably be the first major infrastructure to be restored, since you can build a steam engine to drive a rail car using pre-electronic technology (and a few of these steam locomotives are still in service).

And there are some other rays of hope, too:

First, if you can make it safely to a home base in those early days, you’re gonna have a fighting chance. That window where people think “it’s all gonna be fine” will give you the buffer you need to travel far and fast, assuming you can get the fuel and a working vehicle (gas station fuel pumps will be as dead as modern cars). And, since there won’t be any internet, or television, or radio to tell people that everything won’t be fine, that window may last longer than it would if people had access to the news.

Second, the last fifty years have seen an incredible revival in the kinds of skills that it takes to survive in a world without power. It’s possible to run a gasoline engine on the flue-gasses from a wood reduction fire, and this is something a lot of people did during gasoline rationing in World War 2. You can synthesize diesel out of plastic or any oil you find lying around, with minimal equipment. There will be plenty of spare metal and machinery around, and people from the Maker movement, the Homesteading movement, and the Arts and Crafts movements will immediately set to work rebuilding technological civilization in an industrial-age (rather than an electrical-age) style.

Unless we are hit by a big fucking meteor, civilization on this planet will not end permanently. We will have a long, difficult climb to get back to our current peak, but in a world with a massively reduced population, we don’t need to climb nearly that far to once again live in a world of possibility and purpose. Arguably, the effort of rebuilding will provide plenty of both.

Third, since we are only a few decades out from national electrification, there’s still a lot of animal-powered farm equipment around. And there are those in nearly every community in the country who have made it their business to stockpile books on construction, machinery, metallurgy, chemistry, food preservation, hunting, butchering, weaving, animal husbandry, spinning, leather tanning, farming, composting, sanitation, etc., and those books will serve as seeds for rapid bootstrapping.

Hell, a few people even still keep horses, and ride them—and there is no shortage of wild horses on the American continent.

By the end of the first year post-apocalypse, communities will be on the way to thriving, but life will be (probably for a few generations) intensely local, as it was in the early Middle Ages.

Fourth, there are a lot of Amish communities strewn across the country, and they will likely form the nuclei of many new city-states. A lot of people living near them will learn very quickly how to make life work in the seventeenth-century style, and that knowledge will spread with trade (which will, even in an apocalypse, restart almost immediately).

As I said in my article on the A World of Warlords, how well you do in a collapse depends a lot on who you surround yourself with, and how much value you can add to your community.

The Rational Responses

This is the section I warned you about at the beginning.

In disaster preparedness, as in war, the battle is often decided before it commences.

The world after a Geomagnetic Kill Shot will be very difficult for the first couple years, but if you can make it safely through the first three months you’re going to be at the front end of onward-and-upward. Decide what you want your life to look like after such an event, and start working towards it as you can.

The preparations for this disaster will serve you well in any disaster—and, lest you forget, North America is overdue for a few doozies:

1. A supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone

2. The Cascadia tsunami on the northern West Coast

3. A local civilization-leveling earthquake in California

4. And a geomagnetic apocalypse

This in addition to all the normal dangers of tornadoes, terrorist attacks, wars, crime, earthquakes, hurricanes, and plagues, which is to say nothing of our nuclear war knife-edge and the currently-unfolding chaos brought on by the collapse of the American empire (which might—and I have no probability estimate on this—also unravel the United States as a country, at least for a while).

Do not make the mistake of thinking that the past century’s natural and geopolitical quietude is “normal.” We are due for all of these things—at least some of them will hit us sooner or later.

So what will you do?

Would you rather not live to see a ruined world on the far side of such an event? Are you unwilling to face the hardship and danger it takes to get life working again (it may be extreme!)? Do you have no one you can trust to band together with you, and no way to get into such a position? In such a case you would be wise to have an exit plan—some insulin shots stashed away, a weapon you can use on yourself, a bridge to jump off, etc.

Suicide is not an irrational option when facing certain doom. It is gonna be a rough couple years after the shit hits the fan. There is a certain nobility in the decision to deliberately decide to rule your own end.⁴

But before you make that entirely rational choice, I hope you will consider two things.

First, a horrible disaster is not forever. Suicide is most rational when there is no hope of anything ever improving—on the far side of the apocalypse, there will be nothing but improvement. It will be gradual, halting, and very difficult, but it will be improvement nonetheless.

Second, if you make it through the pinch, consider:

You will be part of the next great human civilization.

Those who survive will lay the stones upon which the future will be built.

So, the question is:

Do you wish to survive and make a new life so you can build a new world?

Do you wish to survive just because you’re not done living yet?

If so, it would be wise to start making your plans now. Stockpile food, install rain catchment for water, learn to can and dry and smoke and ferment so that food will last without refrigeration. Get an old diesel truck and stockpile tractor fuel (it doesn’t go bad like gasoline does). Build yourself a wood gasifier to run your gasoline-powered truck (because it will have to be a truck to haul a boiler around in the back). Learn to smith, or to compost and garden. Learn to shoot—both guns and bows.

More importantly than any of this, get to know your neighbors and build goodwill in your community. In any disaster, no matter how long it lasts, the amount of violence and disruption and suffering is always moderated by the community and how well it pulls together. If you haven’t yet, read my post A World of Warlords to get a feel for how vital this is.

And, if you live in a city, have a bug-out plan, and be ready to go as soon as you can.⁵ There will be a point in the aftermath of any disaster where the difference between making it safe to your bug-out location and getting terminally stuck in traffic will be counted in minutes.

The Reality of Human Life

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams spins a parable about a race who lives in a single small nut tree, in which they maintain a rich and sophisticated civilization. The only members who ever leave the tree are those who speculate openly about whether any of the neighboring trees might be capable of supporting life, and thrown out for heresy.

Exotic as this behavior seems, Adams says, there is no being in the universe who is not in some sense guilty of the same thing.

The universe is an unsettlingly big place. We survive in it, in no small part, through amazing amounts of luck. An event hundreds of thousands of light years away can start a sequence of dominoes that could destabilize our sun and send it nova, or shoot a rogue planet through our solar system and disrupt our orbit, or induce geomagnetic changes in all the planets of our solar system (as seems to be happening at the moment). We are insects in the cosmic scheme, and we can get swatted at any time.

Mostly, we survive by ignoring this.

But when we can see the problems coming, humans are capable of amazing feats of courage.

The apocalypse ain’t the end of the world. Take it from me—I’m a city kid in exile. I was born in academia and lived there for half my life. Now I live on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere, without running water, and I build my own tools. I didn’t do this because I hate technology or civilization, but because I love writing so much I wanted to maintain my health long into old age, which wasn’t going to happen living in a climate-controlled world looking at a screen. Now I spend my days solving practical engineering challenges, chopping wood, building things, forging tools, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We don’t have long on this beautiful world floating naked in the hostile cosmos. We might as well make the most of it...

...even when the worst happens.

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If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Unfolding the World series, a history of the current geopolitical storm rocking our world, its roots, and its possible outcomes.

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

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1. I discussed this in my article The Balloon Goes Up, The Boot Comes Down written at the time.

2. Tom Clancy pulled off this trick when he wrote The Hunt for Red October. As a civilian he pieced together a complete picture of the hypothetical and highly-classified Caterpillar drive that could be used to make a silent submarine (among other things), and he did it so well that the FBI investigated him—finding that he had not, in fact, accessed classified materials in researching his book.

3. These range from completing the vehicle’s natural Faraday cage to keeping shielded Engine Control Units in storage for if/when the big pulse hits to removing computer controls from their vehicles entirely. And, at the extreme end, you have this build of the so-called “Apocalypse Truck”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLywDAreBIk8jisFB9-jm8kTQlw7ePh0aX

4. A reader pointed out in the comments below that there will be some people who are kept alive through out-patient medical care and medications, who will be on a ticking clock should the worst happen. If you are insulin-dependent, or require regular immunoglobulin infusions, or other such treatments, you have the dubious advantage of knowing exactly how long you have before you’re likely to die if everything goes to hell. Factor that into your calculations. Also consider that Type-2 diabetes can be controlled with diet and exercise, so if you have it and your condition is not too advanced, do everything you can to avoid insulin dependence. The world after the big boom will be one where the ground conditions that feed Type-2 diabetes will disappear, so you’re likely to wind up getting more-or-less cured by ironic happenstance.

5. It also wouldn’t hurt to know some alternate routes, and to carry extra fuel in your vehicle.