The Near Miss of 2012

This NASA video describes the near miss of July 2012, when two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) almost knocked Earth "back to the 18th century." It was the most powerful CME Earth has experienced since the 1859 Carrington Event.If it had hit, researchers say we could still be picking up the pieces.

Pete Riley published a paper titled On the Probability of Occurrence of Extreme Space Weather Events,which calculated the probability of such a catastrophe occurring as 12% per decade.

If Earth were to...