The Wake-Up Call I Never Saw Coming
Like most people, I used to roll my eyes at those solar storm warnings. The first G5 storm to hit the planet since 2003 sounded scary, but honestly, what were the odds it would actually affect me? I was one of those people who dismissed space weather alerts as something only scientists and tech nerds needed to worry about. Boy, was I wrong. Some GPS systems have struggled to lock locations and offered incorrect positions during the May 2024 storm, and my phone was one of them. That weekend, when I couldn’t get directions to my sister’s new house and my smartwatch kept showing wildly inaccurate step counts, reality hit hard. Some aerial drone users flying during the storm experienced unusual behavior, including difficulty maintaining a stable hover, disruption of GPS signals, and in some cases a sudden loss of control which resulted in a crash. My neighbor’s expensive photography drone met the same fate, tumbling into his pool after losing GPS lock mid-flight.
When Farmers Couldn’t Farm
Agricultural users of John Deere RTK GPS equipment reported significantly degraded positional accuracy during the geomagnetic storm. As the GPS receivers are used to guide tractors in precision agriculture, certain agricultural workers were forced to suspend planting activities entirely. Think about that for a second – the sun’s anger literally stopped food production across parts of the country. They also generated headaches for farmers whose GPS-guided tractors were idled in the middle of planting season during the May 2024 event. Modern farming relies on centimeter-precise GPS to plant seeds in perfect rows, optimize fertilizer usage, and maximize crop yields. When solar storms scramble these signals, it’s not just an inconvenience – it’s a potential threat to our food supply. The May 2024 storm, rated G5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 1-to-5 Geomagnetic Storms scale, disrupted GPS communications enough to throw off tractor guidance, which requires centimeter-level precision. Imagine being a farmer during planting season, watching your million-dollar equipment sit useless while the optimal planting window slips away.
Satellites Playing Musical Chairs in Space
Satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. This wasn’t just SpaceX’s problem – it was a massive “musical chairs” scenario happening 200 miles above our heads. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn’t have time to calculate the satellites’ changing paths. Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, warned on Saturday of a “degraded service” as the Earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades. Musk said earlier in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far. The fact that Starlink owns around 60% of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth makes their struggle against solar storms a global internet stability issue.
The Power Grid’s Nightmare Scenario
Power grids aren’t just vulnerable to solar storms – they’re sitting ducks. A geomagnetic storm three times smaller than the Carrington Event occurred in Quebec, Canada, in March 1989. The storm caused the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid to collapse. During the storm, the high magnetically induced currents damaged a transformer in New Jersey and tripped the grid’s circuit breakers. In this case, the outage led to 5 million people being without power for nine hours. The scary part? That was considered a “moderate” storm by today’s standards. The geomagnetically induced currents, which can be in excess of 100 amperes, flow into the electrical components connected to the grid, such as transformers, relays and sensors. One hundred amperes is equivalent to the electrical service provided to many households. Currents this size can cause internal damage in the components, leading to large scale power outages. Utilities are scrambling to upgrade their infrastructure, but the threat keeps growing as solar activity intensifies.
My Phone Became a Brick (Temporarily)
During the May 2024 storm, my smartphone turned into an expensive paperweight for about six hours. The GPS kept showing me in the wrong city, apps that relied on location services crashed repeatedly, and even my mobile payment system got confused about where I was trying to make purchases. The particles may also refract and otherwise scramble signals from the global positioning system, according to Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist with NOAA. Those effects can linger for a few days after the storm. What really freaked me out was learning that The GPS features on your phone also typically use a mix of pure GPS and cellular tower-based location tracking, so even if GPS signals are disrupted, phone users may still be able to maintain a rough location fix, but mine couldn’t even manage that. The experience made me realize how much of our daily lives depend on invisible signals bouncing around in space.
Airlines Rerouting Flights Like It’s War Time
Airlines rerouted planes to avoid the high radiation levels and communication blackout areas. NASA ordered the ISS astronauts to take precautionary shelter and approximately 59% of deep space missions and satellites at all orbits experienced anomalies during past extreme solar events. Commercial aviation doesn’t just face navigation problems during solar storms – they deal with dangerous radiation exposure at high altitudes. Pilots flying polar routes are especially vulnerable, as these paths take them through areas where Earth’s magnetic field provides less protection. Airlines maintain “space weather” departments that sound like something out of science fiction, but they’re deadly serious about tracking solar activity. When a major storm hits, flights get delayed, rerouted, or cancelled entirely, stranding thousands of passengers who have no idea the sun is to blame for their travel chaos.
Starlink’s Falling Sky Problem
But then 2024 saw a whopping increase – a total of 316 Starlink satellites fell out of the sky compared to previous years. The researchers grouped these reentries according to the geomagnetic conditions at the time – that is, how powerfully solar activity was affecting Earth. Oddly, some 72 percent of all reentries occurred during weak geomagnetic conditions, not the powerful geomagnetic storms. This, the researchers found, was because of the cumulative effect of drag over the rising period of the solar cycle. It’s like death by a thousand cuts – individual solar events might not kill a satellite, but the cumulative effect drags them down over time. NASA’s Oliveira worries that fragments could survive reentry: “By accelerating this process, pieces of the satellites may survive reentry, allowing bits to plummet back to the ground,” he says. Last summer, one such fragment was recovered on a Canadian farm, confirming that not everything vaporizes. The idea of satellite debris raining down from space because the sun got angry is both fascinating and terrifying.
When Weather Satellites Go Blind
At 00:19 UTC on 13 May, the GOES-16 satellite, the primary operational geostationary weather satellite in the GOES East position, providing a view centered on the Americas, stopped transmitting all data. The transmission of data resumed nearly 2 hours later at 02:00 UTC. There was a second loss of data transmission shortly after, lasting 11 minutes from 03:19 UTC to 03:30 UTC. Imagine meteorologists suddenly going blind during a potentially historic weather event – that’s exactly what happened during the May 2024 solar storm. The irony is cruel: space weather knocking out the satellites we use to predict Earth weather. GOES weather satellite communications were interrupted, causing weather images to be lost. NASA’s TDRS-1 communication satellite recorded over 250 anomalies caused by the increased particles flowing into its sensitive electronics. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where the very systems we need to monitor and predict dangerous conditions become unreliable during the events that make monitoring most critical.
The Economic Reality Check
The May 2024 solar storm didn’t just cause inconvenience – it cost real money. Industries from agriculture to aviation had to adapt on the fly, often at enormous expense. It is even suspected that NASA’s ADEOS-2 spacecraft which carried the $150 million NASA SeaWinds instrument was lost due to these solar storms during the 2003 events. Modern estimates suggest that a Carrington-level event today could cause trillions in economic damage globally. Insurance companies are starting to take notice, with some now offering “space weather” coverage alongside traditional policies. The financial sector is particularly vulnerable, as high-frequency trading algorithms rely on precise GPS timing signals that solar storms can disrupt. When milliseconds matter in financial transactions, space weather becomes a Wall Street problem.
What 2025 Holds for Our Connected World
The updated prediction now calls for Solar Cycle 25 to peak between January and October of 2024, with a maximum sunspot number between 137 and 173, though Per this current prediction, solar maximum has most likely already passed, with a peak between August and November 2024. If this is true, then we could already be in the declining phase of Solar Cycle 25. But don’t get too comfortable – even the declining phase of a solar cycle can produce dangerous storms. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle — the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions — is expected in late 2024 and early 2025. Solar activity has led to increased aurora visibility and impacts on satellites and infrastructure in recent months. During May 2024, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth, creating the strongest geomagnetic storm at Earth in two decades — and possibly among the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years. We’re living in the most connected era in human history, which makes us more vulnerable than ever to our star’s tantrums.
Have you ever stopped to think about how many invisible signals your daily life depends on? Because the sun sure hasn’t.
