Aurora Borealis lights up skies over North America
A light show like few others lit up skies across Saskatchewan and beyond on the weekend.
Space Weather Canada warned last week of a “major geomagnetic storm” that would hit the country starting Friday and continue through the weekend. The storm was associated with massive solar flares that were striking all of Canada.
The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its first geomagnetic storm watch since 2005 and said the storm was a “potentially historic event.”
Such events made the northern lights visible across all of North America.
Brian Thomas of Chatham, Ont., originally from Saskatchewan, said he had seen the northern lights, or Aurora Borealis, plenty of times before, but Friday's display was unprecedented. Much of North America saw it, including people at southern latitudes where the northern lights are not normally visible.
“It was almost like the perfect storm in a way,” Thomas said.
Robyn Fiori, a research scientist at the Canadian Hazards Information Service of Natural Resources Canada, said the storm was caused by “coronal mass ejections” from the sun, sending vast amounts of solar matter toward Earth.
Each eruption, the result of solar flares, can contain billions of tonnes of plasma and magnetic field from the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona.
Fiori said three such ejections were “piggybacking on each other” to deliver a “really big blow” to the planet. Fiori said the sun had intense flare activity over the past 10 days, with 16 X-class flares, the most powerful class of flares.
“The last time we saw 16 flares in a month was maybe 10 years ago,” Fiori said.
The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that's 16 times the diameter of Earth, according to NOAA.