appearance over Owens Valley, as seen from near the Alabama Hills on May 12, 2024 outside of Lone Pine, California. It is the second night that the intense solar storm has produced Northern Lights visible as far south as California. Over the weekend, Earth was bombarded with charged plasma blasted our direction from the outer layers of the sun last week. Thethat were spotted in places as different and distant as Iceland and Hawaii.
While we didn’t see the major outages caused by those earlier storms, last Friday farmers in the Midwest reported that their planting operations ground to a halt because of therequired to operate precision farming equipment. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction center also received isolated reports of some trouble with electric grids and communications systems.early October 28, 2003, at approximately 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Consider how different our reliance on technological infrastructure is today compared to 1859 or even to 2003. It’s unclear how prepared our grid and other surface infrastructure is for such a big blast of stellar energy. Perhaps more concerning is our unprecedented reliance on satellites.
Steenburgh also noted that this current cycle has been outperforming predictions, and may not reach its peak for another year or longer., kicked off by a massive and unexpected solar flare that led to geomagnetic storms on Halloween, followed by more activity three weeks later. What’s more, this all came a few yearsThis is all to say what we saw over the weekend may just be a prelude to something even more dramatic, and potentially destructive.