In All Likelihood, Someday the Sun Will Knock Out the Grid:

eHam.net News - Shortly after sunset on June 18, 2013, a woman drove her minivan onto Brighton Street in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her GPS told her to turn right. But the metallic voice, guided by satellite data, steered her wrong: onto a railroad track. She tried to drive off, but the van got stuck. No sooner had she ­unbuckled herself and her two kids and ushered them out than a train crumpled her car into a ball of foil. Not long after, someone sent a news story about the incident to space physicist Tamitha Skov. She didn't just see a GPS acting up. She saw the sun acting up. While our star looks calm and contained, its ­surface roils: Spots form and darken it like scabs; loops of plasma link its regions; its atmosphere streams farther outward than the star is wide. Solar flares, which are bursts of radiation, and coronal mass ejections, which are bombs of stellar material, disturb both Earth's magnetic field and upper atmosphere. There, they disrupt devices -- like GPS ­receivers -- that rely on electricity or radio communication. This interplay between the sun and Earth is called space weather, and it is Skov's specialty. The last time the sun really made people go uh-oh was on March 10, 1989. Astronomers watched as the star set loose a billion tons of gas at a million miles an hour -- a coronal mass ejection --and blasted a solar flare along with it. The radiation, traveling at light-speed, struck Earth eight and a half minutes later. As it collided with the upper atmosphere, it charged up molecules, blocking radio ­communications at Earth's upper latitudes, including from Europe into Russia, which at the time, listeners took as Cold War interference. The radio-frequency problems mostly affected ground-to-air and ship-to-shore communications, as well as shortwave-radio and amateur radio users.

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