A Solar Storm Strikes Earth—and Provides a Warning for the Future

I'll be honest—I don't pay close attention to space weather. I'm busy enough trying to figure out how scared I should be—and how scared I should make you—of regular old Earth weather, like hurricanes, floods and droughts.

But maybe I should start keeping tabs on what's going on above us. On September 24 the sun unleashed a strong solar storm—an outburst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection that sent a massive cloud of plasma and magnetic energy hurting through space and toward the Earth at 5 million mph. The edges of that energy struck the planet on September 26, producing a medium-size solar storm—a G3 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) five-point scale.

If solar storms are like space hurricanes—close enough—the planet received the equivalent of a glancing blow, enough to cause some possible minor problems with satellite communications and GPS, but nothing most of us would have noticed. But we were lucky. Serious space weather—the catch-all term for sun's unusual activity—has the potential to ruin the electrical grid, disrupt air travel, knock out satellites for years and generally send our high-tech society back to the 18th century. "There's a belief that as we build a society that depends more on technology we become more vulnerable to space weather," says Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the SWPC.     Read More

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