Sun Awakens

We started blogging about solar flares a few years ago because of an article we had seen in the Wall Street Journal tipping us off to how vulnerable our power grid is to solar flares.  And of course the Achilles heel of America, and the Western world, is electricity.  When the lights don't come on....NOTHING works and anarchy starts about 10 minutes later.

The sun is waking up
.
And on June 7, it woke up Michael Hesse. At 5:49 a.m., the solar scientist received an alert on his smartphone. NASA spacecraft had seen a burst of X-rays spinning out from a sunspot. The burst was a solar flare — and a “notably large one” at that, Hesse said later.

The sun has been quiet for years, at the nadir of its activity cycle. But since February, our star has been spitting out flares and plasma like an angry dragon. It’s Hesse’s job to watch these eruptions.
  
If a big one were headed our way, Hesse needed to know, and fast, so he could alert the electric power industry to brace for a geomagnetic storm that could knock some of the North American power grid offline.

Communications satellites will be knocked offline. Financial transactions, timed and transmitted via those satellite, will fail, causing millions or billions in losses. The GPS system will go wonky. Astronauts on the space station will huddle in a shielded module, as they have done three times in the past decade due to “space weather,” the scientific term for all of the sun’s freaky activity. Flights between North America and Asia, over the North Pole, will have to be rerouted, as they were in April during a weak solar storm at a cost to the airlines of $100,000 a flight. And oil pipelines, particularly in Alaska and Canada, will suffer corrosion as they, like power lines, conduct electricity from the solar storm.

See it here; http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/science/as-the-sun-awakens-the-power-grid-stands-vulnerable/2011/06/09/AGwc8DdH_story.html

Holy lights out!!  Can you imagine life with no cell phones, no lap tops, no financial transactions?  Make no mistake about it, THIS WILL HAPPEN...we just don't know exactly when....but it could be later today.  Are you ready for the foundations to be shaken??