Fortunately it wasn't directly earth-facing.
From SpaceWeather.com:
FIRST X-FLARE IN 4 YEARS: A new sunspot emerged during the early hours of July 3rd and promptly exploded, producing the first X-class solar flare since Sept. 2017. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:
Today's explosion registered X1.5 on the Richter Scale of Solar Flares
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Which brings to mind a story that Izabella Kaminska did for the Financial Times last year.
Thanks to the new Sky drama Cobra, another potential planetary emergency may be about to join climate change at the top of the agenda. Cobra stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. It is the UK equivalent of the US government’s “situation room”, where the top brass gather to monitor and deal with crises.
The fictional crisis is a massive solar storm that frazzles the UK’s electric infrastructure. The prime minister must get the lights back on before social collapse, food shortages and anarchy threaten the population. The drama explores the consequences of having insufficient transformers in reserve to help restore electricity quickly. There’s also the added challenge of transporting the ones the UK does have to the right locations. So far, so helpful in ramping up the tensions on screen.
But according to national resilience experts, this scenario is entirely plausible. It may indeed be time to start worrying about the chances of a solar storm ejecting plasma from the sun....
....The Cobra drama explores the second, more serious scenario of what might happen if we fail to take precautionary measures and the nation’s extra high voltage transformers, huge in size, are irreparably burnt out by a solar event. It’s a real world threat because the warning times for solar events can be very short and we don’t have the spare parts at hand that are needed....
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Yes but beyond the complete shut-down of critical electricity dependent infrastructure—think pumps for municipal water systems and gasoline/diesel throughout that entire supply chain right on down to retail, meaning food does not get to major conurbations; and the resulting societal breakdown, devolution to tribes, clans and militias and general mayhem, where's the risk?
