Northern Lights Alert For Tonight

 

If you live north of a latitude of 40 degrees in the US - that's a line from Maryland through Illinois and northern California - there is a good chance you can see the northern lights late tonight. On Monday the sun produced two Class M coronal mass ejections (CME) aimed at our planet and they're going to merge just before washing over our upper atmosphere tonight. Look toward your northern horizon for the show. We shouldn't have any impacts on electronic devices with this ejection; however, there is a more powerful Class X CME occurring today which could impact communications, navigation, and computer chip performance. We'll know more by the weekend when the ejection arrives.  You can follow the story at spaceweather.com.

Below is a post from last month where I addressed some history and significance of CMEs as we have become reliant on electricity and its applications is almost every aspect of our daily lives. 

If you follow this blog for a few years you'll find that I have no issue with the concept of climate change. I do have some questions about the origin of the change and with how to mitigate its negative impacts. But there is a larger element when it come to climate change and that is the threat from what I would call space weather and its long-term equivalent, space climate. If you think about meteors as space rain and hail, and aurora polaris and other electrical and magnetic phenomena as space lightning, you get my point.

What raises this issue today is the potential for some serious solar flares heading toward our planet. The series of solar storms emitting these flares from the surface of the sun is about to rotate into view from Earth. That means we could soon be washed in an abundance of electromagnetic energy that, although a very, very minimal threat to life thanks to our ozone layer, could be a serious threat to a society that relies on electricity.

Solar flares are a frequent occurrence and scientists have measured their strength for a century. The last flare to seriously impact the world's electrical systems and components was in 1972. Earlier this month, Elon Musk's SpaceX program launched another series of Starlink telecommunications satellites. Before they could be moved to their final orbit the headwinds of a strong solar flare doomed them to a degrading orbit and an eventual fiery end in our atmosphere.

In 1859, the high technology of the day had a similar experience. We can only imagine the impact of that event given our reliance on electricity today. Here is more about both events.

On September 1-2, 1859 a massive wave of energy from the sun - a coronal mass ejection or CME - energized our planet to the point that it literally "turned on the lights." Our friends at spaceweather.com wrote this about the event:

. , , a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. No, it was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.

Orange dots mark sighting of auroras on the morning of September 2, 1859

The geomagnetic storm that day was so powerful that telegraph keys sparked and caught fire. Even with power lost in the lines, the storm electrified them to the point that messages could still be sent. Given our dependence on technology today, such storms pose a significant threat. Here's more on the story from NASA's Science News page:

. . . a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes.

Read more about past CME events in this link on the spaceweather.com page.

There is one certainty and that is the more our knowledge expands the more we understand how little we really know. Perhaps it is time to pay as much attention to coronal mass ejections and solar flares as we do to climate change. Both could pose significant world-wide threats. Both deserve more study. Enough for now. I'll let you explore the very new issue of near earth objects (NEO) on you own for now and leave my comments for another day.