Space experts have long warned that if a truly massive solar storm ever hit us much bigger than the current one — it could knock out power grids across North America, leaving millions of people without electricity for months and causing widespread chaos. A storm that big hit Earth back in 1859 (though there were no power grids then, just a bunch of telegraph wires that got frazzled), and we just barely missed getting blasted by a similar-sized solar eruption in 2012.
Those flares sent two coronal mass ejections toward the Earth — clouds of fast moving particles shot out of the sun's outer atmosphere. The first reached Earth on Thursday night, creating a "moderate" G2 geomagnetic storm when it hit our planet's magnetic field. This weekend's storms are expected to cause only modest disruptions, officials from the Space Weather Prediction Center said. Even so, power grid operators are standing by "just in case."
On the upside, geomagnetic storms can also create brightly colored auroras in the skies. An aurora occurs as the charged particles from the sun travel along the Earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere and collide with gas atoms, causing them to emit light. They're frequent in places like Alaska or Iceland, but it takes a strong storm to get auroras this far south.
Those flares sent two coronal mass ejections toward the Earth — clouds of fast moving particles shot out of the sun's outer atmosphere. The first reached Earth on Thursday night, creating a "moderate" G2 geomagnetic storm when it hit our planet's magnetic field. This weekend's storms are expected to cause only modest disruptions, officials from the Space Weather Prediction Center said. Even so, power grid operators are standing by "just in case."
On the upside, geomagnetic storms can also create brightly colored auroras in the skies. An aurora occurs as the charged particles from the sun travel along the Earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere and collide with gas atoms, causing them to emit light. They're frequent in places like Alaska or Iceland, but it takes a strong storm to get auroras this far south.
This eruption is also a reminder that the sun is capable of some truly enormous flare-ups, and much stronger solar storms in the future could do some serious damage. In a worst-case scenario, a massive solar storm could leave 20 to 40 million people in the Northeast without power, according to a sober assessment last year by Lloyd's of London.
As I've detailed before, businesses and government agencies have been devising plans to cope with disruptive space weather — from hardening power grids to rerouting flights that might get disrupted by geomagnetic storms. The biggest concern when it comes to space weather is the possibility that a solar-induced geomagnetic storm could do serious damage to our power grids.
Even a storm that knocked out just 20 key transformers would be "extremely concerning."