Hot hot action!

I live on the wrong side of the world for this. The Aurora Borealis has been doing amazing things for people in North America (and Siberia and Scandinavia, I guess) but the magnetic pole is a long way from Tokyo . . . This story on the big solar flare pictured below makes it sound like quite an event for our little planet.

solar_flare (14k image)

There’s another story right here, however, that makes this seem not so exciting at all. It would be amazing to see what sort of effect this level of solar storm would have on us today, when we’re so dependent on electronic devices for our communications and everything else: “In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii. . . . The event 144 years ago was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory, one that cut power to an entire Canadian province in 1989.”

Time to stock up on some sunblock.

10/30/2003 | web | Comments

Comments are closed for this entry.