Potent enough CME's (Corona Mass Ejections) can knock out grids, satellites, microchip circuitry, as well as thousands of pole transformers... all in a single blow. And once this equipment fails, most of it will require more than an overnight service call to fix.
For a significant event, the radiation will send electrical current downward in an arc and triggered a cascading failure of power grids across the world.
An ejection can pack the wallop of a billion hydrogen bombs. In 1989, a small one struck Quebec, Canada, causing a 9-hour electricity blackout for six million customers.
A NASA-funded study published in 2009 went so far as to suggest electric power and communications to tens of millions of people in the industrialized world could disappear for months.
With communications satellites disabled and the power grid inoperative, everything from the water supply to public transit would go out of service. Gasoline could no longer be pumped from underground tanks, stoplights would fail, consumers couldn't buy groceries, hospitals would become inaccessible and law enforcement personnel would have no way to communicate with each other.
In February 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory, to join the army of space probes monitoring the situation. But like the others, this one can do nothing to thwart the impact of a CME, only watch.
Recent data shows that dramatic and potentially deadly effects can result from solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Substantial data suggests that an event, similar to the one anticipated in the 2012 'doomsday' scenario, occurred about 14,950 years ago and was recorded by ancient humans.
This event appears to have lasted for several years in duration and was responsible for the abrupt end of the last ice age.
The extreme solar event corresponded to powerful radiation coming from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and was associated with gamma rays and cosmic dust. Recent observations have shown a dramatic increase in gamma ray energy in the Galaxy's equator which will be in maximum alignment with our solar system on December 12, 2012.
The past records in ice cores (strata from 13,880 to 13,785 BCE) suggest that intense radiation from this last event could have lasted many years.
It seems highly likely this alignment will cause another extreme solar event, since other factors precipitating a 'solar maximum' also converge on this exact same date...
...we have up until that time to prepare.
Sunspot Cycle 2012 Predictions: Effects on the Power Grid and beyond - Solar flares, Corona Mass Ejections and NASA
