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The British Royal Academy of Engineering has completed a study of the UK power grid showing that it is relatively well prepared to weather a solar superstorm–but the opposite is true in the United States.

It turns out that explosive eruptions of energy from the sun are fairly common. In BBC News, Jonathan Amos quotes the UK study as saying that If a solar superstorm struck the Earth, the effects on the UK would be "challenging but not cataclysmic."

He quotes space engineer Keith Ryden as saying, "Fortunately, satellites are already designed to deal with a lot of this space weather."
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An X-5 solar flare has sent a coronal mass ejection directly toward earth. The CME is now impacting earth’s atmosphere, and has the potential to disrupt satellites, unprotected power grids and global positioning systems. While there may not be a strong effect on well protected satellites and power grids in the developed world, there is a greater possibility that grids in the developing world could fail temporarily.
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The sun is in the most unusual state that has ever been observed. At a time when it should be recording greatly diminished sunspot activity, the most active sunspot ever observed has just finished crossing its face. The largest solar flare ever recorded–by far–exploded out of this sunspot on November 4.

This extraordinary event wasn’t headline news. In fact, it didn’t even make the back pages of most papers and news websites, let alone the broadcast news. Unknowncountry, Earthfiles and the NASA and NOAA sites were the only places where it was really featured as a major news item.
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