Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008
There was a large solar flare a couple days ago. It included a coronal mass ejection that’s heading straight towards Earth. It will hit us only a couple hours after I post this. At least it looks like it won’t cause any troubles beyond overly pretty auroras.
This isn’t always the case.
There has been at least one instance of strong solar flares causing major blackouts on Earth. In 1989, one of these coronal mass ejections took out the power grid in Quebec for nine hours. Smaller solar storms briefly take out radio and satellites on a regular basis.
Pretty impressive for random bits of sun stuff. Pretty wide spread bits, too. By the time the coronal mass ejection (which, as the name implies, is sun stuff from the corona of the sun getting tossed out into space) hits anything, the particles have had plenty of time to spread out.
And up until we humans started working with electricity, the only thing these solar storms did was produce spectacular auroras in areas that normally don’t see them. The Earth’s magnetic field is really good at protecting us from what comes at us from the sun. The lights of the auroras are a side effect of the magnetic field neutralizing those dangers.
But now we work with things sensitive to the fairly gentle power surges that can get caused by what manages to get past the magnetic field. And we’ve put some of those delicate electronics up into space, where they’re less protected (only less, satellites still orbit well within the veil of the magnetic field). So every so often these solar storms cause a bit of trouble, but all in all it’s still minor trouble.
Now, when we finally move off this planet and live away from the protective cradle of Earth’s magnetic field, things will be different. Maybe at that point solar weather will be part of the daily weather reports. Or whatever we have at that point to tell us if it’ll rain.
