Starting Friday, Earth could face a significant geomagnetic storm, potentially offering a stunning northern lights display to most of Michigan, not just its northern reaches. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a rare G4 alert on Thursday, marking the first such warning since 2005. Expected to impact Earth's magnetic field on Friday and continue through the weekend, this storm reached unprecedented G5, or extreme, conditions by Friday evening, a phenomenon not witnessed since 2003 according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.
Geomagnetic storms arise as significant disruptions in Earth's magnetosphere, triggered by the energy unleashed by solar winds. Severe disturbances often follow coronal mass ejections (CMEs), events where the sun ejects vast amounts of plasma and magnetic fields. NOAA disclosed on Thursday that it had identified at least five "earth-directed" CMEs. Furthermore, the agency noted the presence of numerous potent solar flares emanating from a "large and magnetically complex" sunspot cluster, boasting a size 16 times that of Earth.
Since the onset of the solar cycle in 2019, only three severe geomagnetic storms have occurred. These storms possess the potential to inflict widespread disruption on power grids, spacecraft, and radio communications.
Robert Steenburg, a space scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado, emphasized the risk during a press call on Friday, stating, "The solar storm could induce an electrical current that is not supposed to be there. Our role is to alert the operators of these different systems so that they're aware and can take actions to mitigate these kinds of impacts."
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