Oh, That Was A Massive Geomagnetic Storm

Were you wondering why you felt a little weird yesterday? Why your equilibrium was off, why you were so cranky and walked in the wrong direction when you got out of the subway? It wasn’t just a case of the Mondays, silly: a powerful geomagnetic storm was bombarding the planet with a cloud of charged ions moving at 500 kilometers per second. It was a total coronal mass ejection!

NASA’s SOHO spacecraft picked up the nasty shock wave of solar wind on Saturday. Scientists predicted it would take three days to arrive, but this one was booking. “It hit earlier and harder than forecast,” says Doug Biesecker of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, to New Scientist’s Rachel Courtland.

I’ll say. I didn’t know which way was up. Luckily, the storm was not strong enough to knock out any power grids-as happened to the Hydro-Quebec grid in 1989, when 6 million people were left powerless for six hours. It did make for some very pretty auroras in Iceland-which is already lucking out with that cool newly erupted snow volcano. More disturbingly, but also kind of awesomely, that illustration of the earth’s geomagnetic field makes it look like the planet is being attacked by a giant space spider.