- Cheryl Lindo Jones via Flickr
- Not an alien invasion: the aurora borealis over Chicago in 2006.
This has been a strange week here in Chicago. Boiling water turned to snow. (It also retained its ability to burn.) Steam rose from Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, at least in the parts where they weren’t frozen into modernist ice sculpture. If we still believed in signs and wonders, and that the world will end not in fire but in ice, a very good case could be made that this week is the beginning of end times.
But now space scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say there was a huge sunspot eruption (technical term: coronal mass ejection) on Tuesday that sent a whole bunch of charged particles our way, and the disturbance in the atmosphere will be so great, we should be able to see northern lights all the way down here in Chicago, and maybe even in central Illinois. It takes a while for the particles to get to earth from the sun, so the aurora borealis won’t be appearing until this evening.
