THE CHANCE OF STORMS JUST DOUBLED: If you think you're safe from geomagnetic storms, think again. A new study just published in the research journal Space Weather finds that powerful storms may be twice as likely as previously thought.

Jeffrey Love of the US Geological Survey, who authored the study, analyzed Earth's strongest geomagnetic storms since the early 1900s. Previous studies looked back only to the 1950s. The extra data led to a surprise:

"A storm as intense as, say, the Québec Blackout of 1989 is predicted to occur, on average, about every four solar cycles. This is twice as often as estimated using only the traditional shorter dataset," says Love.

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