Coronal-mass ejections are associated with flares and filaments. CMEs pack the most powerful punch a solar storm can deliver. The largest of these can send more than 1 billion tons of protons and electrons racing from the sun at speeds of more than 4 million miles an hour. The intensity of the effect they have on Earth depends on the location of the source region on the sun as well as on how strongly the cloud's magnetic field couples to that of Earth as it arrives. The stronger the coupling, the more intense the geomagnetic storm. As the CME travels, it plows through the sun's slower-moving solar wind, creating a shock wave that can turbocharge protons, generating a radiation storm. When it reaches Earth, a CME can trigger an initial, intense geomagnetic storm, followed by a few days of continued disturbance of varying intensity. Effects range from brighter auroras and surges along power grids and long-distance pipelines to intense radiation storms and severely disrupted radio communications in polar regions. During CMEs, airlines reroute fights that ordinarily use polar routes to maintain radio communications for transcontinental flights.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
