NASA has shared an extraordinary photo of the Northern Lights for World Earth Day but an astronomer noted its eerie warning. The Beauty and the Beast spectacle was captured in the sky in Iceland by astronomer Juan Carlos Casado in 2016. He warned the display could “impair civilisation” one day.
The expert explained the event can interfere with global power grids.
He wrote in the picture caption: “Admire the beauty but fear the beast.
“The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilisation.
“In 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth’s magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event.
“A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME.
“What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth’s magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks.
“Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced.
“The featured aurora was imaged in 2016 over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth’s large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.”
Aurora’s are the result of electrically charged particles from the sun colliding with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA has captured images of previous aurorae in the Earth’s atmosphere from the International Space Station (ISS).
Earth Day is celebrated worldwide on April 22 in support of environmental protection.
The day was first celebrated in 1970 and now has 193 events across the world.
The first-ever Earth Day was marked by 22 million Americans who marched to protest against the destruction of the environment.