American Blackout imagines the story of a national power failure in the United States caused by a cyberattack ' told in real time, over 10 days, by those who kept filming on cameras and phones. Experience an American Blackout in this immersive interactive site that leads you through a catastrophic blackout over ten days. See the trailer for American Blackout, the story of a national power outage, told by those who kept filming on cameras and phones.

A catastrophic, prolonged failure of the electrical grid—the sort of event whose effects are  depicted in National Geographic Channel’s upcoming American Blackout, which premieres Sunday—may seem like just apocalyptic science fiction to some viewers.  Unfortunately, though, the possibility of such a breakdown is all too real. A solar storm, which would spew a surge of radiation across the 93million-mile distance between the Sun and our Earth, causing an electromagnetic pulse similar to the one that a high-altitude nuclear blast would trigger–except that it might be even bigger, and have even more devastating effects. While we’ve known the destructive effects of solar weather on Earth’s electrical infrastructure since the 19th century, the first really clear-cut warning came in 1989, when a moderate-intensity solar storm caused northeastern Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid to fail, leaving millions of people without electricity for nine hours.

Yousef Butt, a scientist at Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, argued in a 2010 article in the online journal Space Review that the likelihood of a devastating EMP from a solar storm is greater than that from an intentional EMP attack.

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