Modern civilisation is totally dependent on electricity. Be it communications, transport, travel or energy production we need electricity. We couldn’t imagine a world without it. A new report from a UK government body, however, says we might need to get prepared. The report drawn up by Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) has warned that humanity might only have a 12-hour warning between observation of the phenomenon and the time a solar storm impacts Earth.

According to the Space Weather Preparations Strategy in the worst case scenario a ‘coral mass ejection’ from the Sun could cause great damage to the grid, satellite systems, communications, train and air travel. Coral mass ejections are huge eruptions on the Sun’s surface resulting in large parts of the corona blasting into space. The good news is that such occurrences generally happen every 150 years. The bad news is that we haven’t seen one in the last 156 years, when the largest geomagnetic storm recorded hit Earth.