If you don’t have enough to worry about

24 Jun, 2012 by Craig Newmark

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“Space weather expert has ominous forecast“.

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt.

This isn’t the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before – and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.