"99 years ago this week, people around the world woke up to some unusual headlines"
From SpaceWeather:
THE GREAT GEOMAGNETIC STORM OF MAY 1921: 99 years ago this week, people around the world woke up to some unusual headlines.
"Telegraph Service Prostrated, Comet Not to
Blame" — declared the Los Angeles Times on May 15, 1921. "Electrical
Disturbance is 'Worst Ever Known'” — reported the Chicago Daily
Tribune. "Sunspot credited with Rail Tie-up" — deadpanned the New York
Times.
They didn’t know it at the time, but the
newspapers were covering the biggest solar storm of the 20th Century.
Nothing quite like it has happened since.
It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot
AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle
15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass
ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. For the next 3 days, CMEs
rocked Earth’s magnetic field. Scientists around the world were
surprised when their magnetometers suddenly went offscale, pens in
strip chart recorders pegged uselessly to the top of the paper.
Then the fires began. Around 02:00 GMT on
May 15th, a telegraph exchange in Sweden burst into flames. About an
hour later, the same thing happened across the Atlantic in the village
of Brewster, New York. Flames engulfed the switch-board at the
Brewster station of the Central New England Railroad and quickly
spread to destroy the whole building. That fire, along with another
one about the same time in a railroad control tower near New York
City's Grand Central Station, is why the event is sometimes referred
to as the "New York Railroad Superstorm."....
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