An Aurora in Arkansas

On the night of November 11, 2025, Veterans’ Day, an out-of-state friend dropped me a line to say that I should head outside, as the northern lights could be seen in the sky. It’s rare that the aurora descends this far south—it only does so if the sun has thrown out a particularly powerful coronal mass ejection (CME), the eruption of charged particles that, by interacting with our magnetic field, create these displays. I was skeptical that anything might be visible here in central Arkansas, especially in the light pollution hell that is the Little Rock metropolitan area. However, I walked outside to see what I could see. And there did indeed seem to be a pinkish glow lingering in the trees, so my wife and I drove up to the top of our hill, where a church overlooks the flat of the city’s public golf course, and we could indeed see a field of pink and purple above the horizon. Taking out my phone and setting the camera for a slow exposure revealed more light than I could see with my own eyes.

Solar storms aren’t simply shimmering scenes of beauty. The earth’s magnetic field protects us from a lot of the danger, but our modern world could be particularly impacted by a particularly fierce solar storm. For example, take the September 1859 geomagnetic storm known as the Carington Event. This storm was so powerful that it sparked auroral patterns in the sky as far south as Colombia, not too far north of the equator. Reportedly, the lights were so bright that some people rose from bed to get their day started, believing that the sun was in the sky. So much electromagnetism rode on the winds of this storm that telegraph stations went haywire. In some cases, stations that had disconnected themselves from their power sources, to keep from burning up, were still able to transmit and receive messages using the current provided by the aurora.

The impact of such an event upon our more electronically interconnected society would be infinitely more dire, inflicting perhaps trillions of dollars upon the infrastructure of the United States alone. Satellites would be knocked offline, computing systems would be disrupted, and all forms of telecommunications would be kaput. Consequently, your favorite website, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, would be inaccessible to you, perhaps even destroyed.

A future society that arose from the wreckage of such a modern Carington Event would know that the EOA had existed, had they but access to works of history in print, for the EOA has been cited quite extensively. Like the case with the lost Book of Jasher mentioned two or three times in the Hebrew scriptures, or the works of Roman philosopher Varro, which no longer survive but which were quoted extensively by St. Augustine in his City of God, future historians might be able to determine in large part the general contents of the EOA and maybe even ascribe to it an editorial perspective comparable to surviving contemporary works of history.

The rich detail the EOA encompasses would be lost, but its effect might still pervade the broader historiography. I work hard to encourage people pursuing specific subjects to think of their assigned entries not merely as ends, but as the means of further engagement with the broader historical community—especially to consider writing something on their subjects of choice for a historical journal, or even turning their research into a book. Not that I am motivated solely in motivating others by the potential catastrophe awaiting fragile websites such as the EOA by geomagnetic storms. But there is, indeed, an inverse relationship between a medium’s transmissibility and its permanence. Carve some words into a mountain, and those words will remain there a long time, but people will have to come see them. Put some words on a website, and those words can reach the world entire, but a night sky lit with some of that auroral brightness this far south could degauss the libraries upon libraries of information we have put online.

The EOA exists upon the highly transmissible end of the spectrum, so far as a medium goes, but we also hope to spark a drive for greater permanence, either by motivating people to donate their old documents and pictures to the proper archive, or encouraging people to employ all the information held herein to compose their own journal articles or books. This is where history as a discipline lies, in the interplay between transmissibility and permanence. Where the lights in the night sky delight and illuminate but will never be strong enough to destroy what we have created.

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas