Last week's Weird Science Roundup included a NASA-funded report warning if a glob of the sun's plasma were to escape and enter the earth's magnetic shield, it could disrupt our entire power grid... and basically cause the end of the world as we know it. So just how credible is this theory? We asked our own Phil Plait for his thoughts on the matter, which, alarmingly, did not include it being a totally bogus possibility. Here's what he had to say:
Actually, while they play up the worst cases, what they say is not totally out of bounds. I'm not sure about the number of deaths quoted, but the scenarios are plausible. Our grid is running nearly at capacity, and a huge DC current dumped into them from a geomagnetically induced current could overload a huge number of transformers. The 1989 Quebec event was a taste of how that could ...
