Tremor & Tide

Series C · What Comes Next · Ep. 02 · 15:29 · 15 Nov 2026

Could the Power Grid Survive the 1859 Solar Storm?

Thumbnail · AI reconstruction

Premieres SUN 15 NOV · 10:00 CDMX

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Chapters

  1. 0:00 The line that ran on the sky
  2. 0:59 What was the Carrington Event?
  3. 2:32 How a solar storm gets into a power line
  4. 3:59 How much warning would we get?
  5. 4:56 The Quebec blackout of 1989
  6. 6:33 Two ways a power grid can fail
  7. 7:48 May 2024: the storm the grid survived
  8. 9:05 What a solar storm would not break
  9. 10:04 Why transformers are the weak point
  10. 11:39 Could the power grid survive the 1859 solar storm?
  11. 13:04 The storm that missed Earth
  12. 14:09 What we still don't know

Sources & credits

Sources

  1. 01
    G. B. Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph, 1860
  2. 02
  3. 03
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  5. 05
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  7. 07
  8. 08
  9. 09
  10. 10
  11. 11

Footage and images

Carrington's sketch (1859): U.S. Geological Survey (public domain). G. B. Prescott (1860) via Internet Archive; E. Loomis, American Journal of Science (1860). Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865, Smithsonian American Art Museum. NASA/SDO and NASA Goddard (Conceptual Image Lab; Scientific Visualization Studio: STEREO-A, ENLIL model). NASA Earth Observatory (Black Marble, Suomi NPP VIIRS; aurora of 11 May 2024, image by Wanmei Liang). NASA (ISS image iss071e006791). NOAA / GOES-19 CCOR-1. Geoelectric hazard map: U.S. Geological Survey. Diagram data: Love et al. (2024), Hayakawa et al. (2025), ORNL-6665, NERC, USGS, NOAA (redrawn); coastlines: Natural Earth.

Some scenes are AI reconstructions or AI illustrations and are labelled on screen; blackout scenes are labelled "hypothetical scenario". Original music.

Thumbnail: AI reconstruction. Made for Tremor & Tide (Nexlev Thumbnail Lab, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst).

AI & archive disclosure

This episode mixes real archive (always labeled) with AI reconstructions and simulations (always labeled). No AI image is presented as a photograph of a real event.

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