Fierce solar magnetic storm barely missed Earth in July 23,2012

"Perfect storm" could have knocked out the electrical grid and disabled satellites and GPS, costing trillions worldwide

March 21, 2014

This image captured on July 23, 2012 at 12:24 a.m. EDT shows a coronal mass ejection that left the sun at the unusually fast speeds of over 1,800 miles per second (credit: NASA/STEREO)

According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections — the most intense eruptions on the sun — sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth’s orbit.

Had the eruption come nine days earlier, when the ignition spot on the solar surface was aimed at Earth, it would have hit the planet, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites, and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives.

The solar bursts would have enveloped Earth in magnetic fireworks matching the largest magnetic storm ever reported on Earth, the Carrington event of 1859.

The dominant mode of communication at that time, the telegraph system, was knocked out across the United States, even electrically shocking telegraph operators. Meanwhile, the Northern Lights lit up the night sky as far south as Hawaii.

In a paper appearing Tuesday, March 18 in the journal Nature Communications, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and research physicist Ying D. Liu, now a professor at China’s State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, UC Berkeley research physicist Janet G. Luhmann and their colleagues report their analysis of the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft./.../