Surviving space weather: How a coronal mass ejection could knock out power grids, internet

LOS ANGELES - On March 30, the sun released one of the strongest types of solar flares — known as an X-class flare — prompting organizations like The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to sound the alarm on the arrival of a "cannibal" coronal mass ejection (CME).While "cannibal" sounds like a scary word, it’s simply a frenzy of fast-moving solar eruptions that group together in the same region of space triggering a powerful geomagnetic storm.While the solar storm caused no Hollywood-style destruction, its most visible effect was instead a colorful show of the aurora borealis that could be visible at latitudes farther south than usual.Though the energy of this storm was harmlessly absorbed by Earth’s magnetic field, large solar storms do have the potential to wreak havoc.Here’s everything you need to know to survive a potentially devastating coronal mass ejection.

In order to understand what a CME is, it's important to understand the solar cycle. Every 11 years, the sun completes a solar cycle in which mass amounts of radiation and plasma are emitted in the form of solar storms.

During this cycle, large eruptions of immense energy containing the power of several nuclear bombs explode from the surface of the sun, ripple through space and inevitably strike Earth. These are coronal mass ejections. Traveling at over a million miles per hour, the ejected mass of protons and electrons can cross the 93-million-mile distance from the sun to the Earth in a matter of days.

Because the area of space between the Earth and the sun is so vast, there are many CMEs that don’t actually reach our home planet.But every now and then, this massive explosion of energy does hit our planet, resulting in a geomagnetic storm.