The power industry in North America has taken steps in recent years to harden its infrastructure to protect from the dangerous surges. 'The geomagnetic storm can actually cause transformers to burn through if they are not adequately protected,' said Muscheler of Lund University.įILE - The sun rises over Mount Hood in the aftermath of the largest solar storm in years, over Portland, Oregon, March 8, 2012. The third phase, known as the coronal mass ejection - gas and magnetic field explosions on the surface of the sun - disturbs the planet's magnetosphere, lighting up the sky and inducing electrical currents on the surface, which can overload power grids and speed corrosion of pipelines. In subsequent minutes and hours, highly charged particles unleash a radioactive storm, posing a danger to astronauts in orbit. They also create additional drag on some satellites, degrading their orbits, which is what happened to the Starlink satellites. The initial trouble occurs on the daylight side of the planet from the early arriving X-rays, which dramatically disrupt the ionosphere - where the Earth's atmosphere meets space - and radio communications. The first occurs here eight minutes after the solar event 150 million kilometers away, the time it takes light to travel from the sun. When the sun shoots out energy, it affects Earth in phases. Up to 40 SpaceX high-speed internet satellites were knocked out of orbit by a geomagnetic storm shortly after launch.Ī relatively minor solar storm, that caused a disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field, is blamed for the loss of as many as 40 of the 49 Starlink internet-access satellites launched February 3 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 'A failure in one kind of sector can propagate through the system and affect a lot of other things, and I think that's probably the thing that worries me most about storms is that they can be widespread and can have consequences in all kinds of systems that that we might not otherwise think about,' Baker said.įILE - This time-exposure image shows a trail of a group of SpaceX's Starlink satellites passing over Uruguay, some 185 km north of Montevideo, Feb.

'One has to be aware of it and one has to calculate the risks and be prepared as much as possible.'Ī new study of ancient ice samples conducted by the Swedish scientist concludes that a previously unknown, huge solar storm about 9,200 years ago would have crippled communications if it had hit Earth in modern times.

'It's just a matter of time,' according to professor Raimund Muscheler, chair of quaternary sciences in the geology department of Lund University in Sweden. 'Certainly, in the longer term, it's not a question of if but when.'Īstrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm capable of causing catastrophe to be as high as 12% in a decade. 'It's not as rare as an asteroid or a comet hitting the Earth, but it's something that really needs to be dealt with by policymakers,' said Daniel Baker, distinguished professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado. Modern technology, however, is vulnerable to the shocks from extreme solar storms. In the past, these were mainly celestial events with spectacular aurora light shows but scant impact on humanity. The Earth suffers a devastating direct hit every century or two, according to recent analysis of scientific data and historic accounts. These outbursts from the sun, which eject energy in the form of magnetic fields and billions of tons of plasma gas known as 'coronal mass ejections,' are unpredictable and difficult to anticipate.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about: Some scientists are warning about the inevitable catastrophic effects on modern life from a super-sized solar storm.

Sun corona solar flares