A filament breaks free and blasts off the sun on 24 Feb 2012. This one happened on the sun's north pole and poses no danger for earth. Image courtesy NASA SoHo.

NASA scientists are closely monitoring the sun as it heads into the most active phase in its sunspot cycle. The sun’s magnetic poles flip every 22 years, meaning the field strength maxes and wanes in each polar hemisphere a little over once a decade. Each 11 year cycle produces large flares and other phenomena, and if the earth happens to lay in the path of a big one it can cause problems. That’s what happened in 1859, when large flare disrupted early communication networks and lit up skies as far south as Jamaica with rare, ghostly aurora. If something like the Carrington Event were to happen today, the consequences could be even more catastrophic:

(EIJ) — nineteenth- and twentieth-century telegraph systems were more resilient than today’s electronics. Solar flares can bake the circuitry that controls aircraft, banking, GPS, radio, TV broadcasts, iPods, and the Internet. As NASA solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta put it: “A similar storm today might knock us for a loop.” On March 13, 1989, a 90-second solar blast slapped HydroQuebec’s transmission system and left six million Canadians without electricity for nine hours. The storm cooked transformers in Great Britain and triggered 200 “anomalies” at oil-, coal-, and nuclear-fueled facilities across the US.

We could be prepared for this, at least a little. The House passed a bill in Aug 2010 that would have stocked back up transformers and other components in the event of global power failure that could take days or weeks to even partially restore. Congressman Rosco Bartlett (R-MD) noted on his website that “These transformers are not manufactured in the U.S. and cost $10 million each and take 1-2 years to deliver.” Sadly, the Senate did not follow suit and the bill now languishes.