If the 1859 Solar Storm Had Hit Earth Today

[Friends just call me Ross]

Interesting article on CMEs and life on a High Tech Planet:

http://theconversation.com/space-weather-threatens-high-tech-life-92711

 

Quote

Shortly after 4 a.m. on a crisp, cloudless September morning in 1859, the sky above what is currently Colorado erupted in bright red and green colors. Fooled by the brightness into thinking it was an early dawn, gold-rush miners in the mountainous region of what was then called the Kansas Territory woke up and started making breakfast. What happened in more developed regions was even more disorienting, and carries a warning for the wired high-tech world of the 21st century.

As the sky lit up over the nighttime side of the Earth, telegraph systems worldwide went berserk, clacking nonsense code and emitting large sparks that ignited fires in nearby piles of paper tape. Telegraph operators suffered electrical burns. Even disconnecting the telegraph units from their power sources didn’t stop the frenzy, because the transmission wires themselves were carrying huge electrical currents. Modern technology had just been humbled by a fierce space weather storm that had arrived from the sun, the largest ever recorded – and more than twice as powerful as a storm nine years earlier, which had itself been the largest in known history.

My seven years of research on predicting solar storms, combined with my decades using GPS satellite signals under various solar storm conditions, indicate that today’s even more sensitive electronics and satellites would be devastated should an event of that magnitude occur again. In 2008, a panel of experts commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences issued a detailed report with a sobering conclusion: The world would be thrown back to the life of the early 1800s, and it would take years – or even a decade – to recover from an event that large...

 

CME = Coronal Mass Ejection

[hatcheckgirl]

Oh.Dear. 

Quite awe-inspiring, isn't it...

[Shawnster]

(Luke 21:25) Also, there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars
 

[hatcheckgirl]

Wouldn’t take much to get this planet out of kilter with celestial phenomena like that! Puny humans, like a film of dust.