Solar Storms have been plaguing the earth since the beginning of time. The effects of these solar storms until recently had little effect on mankind. The world's governments have quietly begun taking this threat to our modern way of life very serious as of late. Lets take an in depth look at just what has transpired in the last few years.Our more modern society didn't really pay too much attention to solar storms until the Carrington Event of 1859. This was an enormous coronal mass ejection (CME) that carried enough electromagnet energy to overwhelm the Earth protective magnetic field and knock out the only real technology of the time, the telegraph system. The electromagnetic energy carried enough of a punch to shock some of the telegraph operators, and even start fires in some cases.
In March of 1989, a solar storm much less intense than that of 1859 caused a major power grid in Canada covering an entire province to go down for nine hours. It damaged transformers in Quebec, New Jersey, and Great Britain, as well as causing more than 200 power anomalies across the USA. Then in 1994, two communications satellites suffered major malfunctions, disrupting radio, television, and other communications due to a solar storm. Another storm triggered a regional blackout in southern Sweden and may have damaged transformers in South Africa, in October of 2003.
The Earth won the roulette spin, on April 19th, 2010. One of the most massive eruptions in years was observed by NASA's SDO, but fortunately we were not in the line of fire this time. Again on August 1st 2010, the sun emitted a C-class solar flare that spewed a coronal mass ejecting in our direction. The CME impacted with our magnetic field on August 3rd. This one was only strong enough to provide a brilliant aurora seen down to about the 45th parallel. On Valentines day 2011, a M6.6-category X-ray irradiance magnitude blast was unleashed from our sun. This CME was the largest so far in the current cycle.