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June 2026 gave Solar Cycle 25's so-called declining phase its loudest month yet, and the following four weeks kept proving that "post-maximum" is not the same as "quiet." On the 3rd, Active Region 4455 fired three major flares within about ten hours of each other (an M9.3, an M7.7, and finally an X1.0), each throwing off a coronal mass ejection, with the X-class event triggering an R3-strong radio blackout across the sunlit hemisphere.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center answered with a G3-strong geomagnetic storm watch for June 4 and 5, warning that the combined CMEs could push aurora as far south as Illinois and Oregon. The region's magnetic complexity kept forecasters on edge for days afterward.

That wasn't a one-off. AR4473 opened the solstice with an M3-class flare on June 21, and the month closed the way it began: on June 30, Region 4475 fired an M5.8, followed within hours by an X1.1 from neighboring Region 4479, causing a S1 minor radiation storm warning. NOAA's own tally for the final week of June counted one X-class flare, two dozen M-class flares, and fifty coronal mass ejections; the kind of numbers that belong to a rising cycle, not a fading one. "Post-maximum" describes an average. It was never a ceiling.

That solar backdrop was also the frame for one of the month's headlines: on June 11, The Niño 3.4 index sat at +0.7°C and climbing, the eastern Pacific ran hotter still at +2.1°C, and the CPC now puts the odds of a "very strong" event peaking this winter at 63%, a threshold that would rank it among the largest El Niños in the record back to 1950.

Forecasters at the ECMWF have gone further, calling the developing event a candidate for the strongest El Niño ever recorded. Mainstream coverage is already reaching for record-year headlines. What it keeps missing is the mechanism: a Super Niño isn't the ocean generating heat, it's the ocean releasing it; a thermal capacitor discharging into the atmosphere and out to space. Paired with a Sun that won't settle down, that's not the signature of runaway warming. It's the signature of a system shedding energy.

The water on the ground bore that out:
  • Southwest China's mountain torrents triggered a red alert, and a tornado struck Nanning the same week.
  • Southern China was hit twice in a week: Guangdong and Guangxi took 30 inches of rain in 24 hours, forcing school closures and evacuations, then Guizhou and Guangxi took another 8 inches in just 16 hours.
  • Ghana's Western Region saw 1,700 people displaced by days of heavy rain, then the capital Accra was hit again on the 30th, killing 13 as another 5.5 inches fell in 24 hours.
  • Lanesville, Indiana, received over 8 inches of summer rain in a single burst of extreme flash flooding.
  • Flash floods in India's Arunachal Pradesh destroyed homes and a bridge.
  • Two tropical storms brought landslides and flooding to Japan, dropping 8.7 inches of rain in 24 hours.
  • Kentucky recorded four flash-flood deaths as a foot of rain fell in 48 hours.
  • Armenia's Gyumri was paralyzed by a hailstorm that left ice layers 1.5 meters deep in the streets.
  • Baseball-sized hail pounded Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
  • Cars were swept away, and roads collapsed in western El Salvador after heavy rains.
  • Rural Manitoba communities were left without power or clean water after storm-driven floods.
  • Texas logged up to 4 inches of rain an hour, prompting multiple water rescues.
And more electrical discharges:
  • The Netherlands recorded 188,000 lightning discharges in a single weekend, an event its national weather service called "exceptional."
  • A single lightning strike in Kyrgyzstan killed over 300 sheep.
Then there was the snow that shouldn't have been falling in June:
  • Genhe, in Inner Mongolia, saw late-season snowfall.
  • Mount Washington, New Hampshire, took over 6 inches during what should have been the last weekend of spring.
  • Scotland saw June snow as unsettled weather swept the UK.
  • The Alps picked winter back up while Oregon logged a June frost.
None of this reads as a warming planet running a fever. It reads as a jet stream that can't hold a lane, spilling polar air into places that should already be deep into summer. The instability showed up sideways, too:

Illinois had already broken its all-time yearly tornado record, 164 reports by June 18, past the previous mark of 142 set in 2024, before the month was even over, and the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur dropped more than 2 feet of rain on Louisiana in 48 hours after spawning tornadoes across the Midwest. Twin waterspouts turned up twice, off Guangdong and again over West Bengal.

And the ground itself kept opening: a sinkhole swallowed a stretch of road and a traffic light in Malacca, Malaysia; another collapsed a section near I-70 in St. Louis; a third submerged a car, driver still inside, in Norfolk, Virginia. Three sinkholes on three continents in one month isn't a pattern mainstream geology spends much time on.

Volcanic and seismic activity stayed elevated across the Pacific Ring of Fire:
  • Indonesia's Palu region, still recovering in memory from 2018, was rattled by a magnitude-6.7 quake that killed several and damaged well over a thousand homes.
  • China's Qinghai province took a shallow magnitude-6.3 quake that killed one.
  • A magnitude-6.9 quake struck off northeastern Japan.
  • Indonesia's Semeru volcano sent a pyroclastic flow 4.5 kilometers down its southeastern flank.
  • Guatemala's Volcán de Fuego erupted with little warning, scattering incandescent rock across hiking trails and sending tourists running.
  • The Philippines' Taal Volcano logged its fourth eruptive event of the month on the 30th, a phreatomagmatic blast that sent a 1,200-meter ash plume over the crater and set off tsunami-like waves across the lake.
Two events sat above everything else this month: On June 8, an offshore magnitude-7.8 earthquake ruptured the Cotabato Trench off southern Mindanao, the strongest to hit the Philippines since 1976. The initial toll of 32 dead climbed past 90 within days as rescue teams reached General Santos and the surrounding provinces, with more than 200 injured and a tsunami over a meter high striking nearby coasts.

Then, on June 24, Venezuela was struck by a magnitude-7.2 foreshock and a magnitude-7.5 mainshock less than 40 seconds apart, centered near Yumare, west of Caracas. The shaking leveled roughly 80% of the buildings in La Guaira state and tore through Caracas, Aragua, and Carabobo. The confirmed dead climbed from under 200 in the first day to past 2,000 within a week, and beyond 4,500 by the most recent tallies, with tens of thousands still reported missing and USGS's own damage model warning the final toll could run past 10,000.

Damage estimates already exceed $6.7 billion. It stands as one of the deadliest single seismic events anywhere on Earth this year, and it landed in the same four-week window as the Sun's loudest run since spring and the Pacific's formal tip into an El Niño some forecasters are calling the strongest on record.

The fireball count kept its now-familiar rhythm: New Mexico and Colorado in the first week, twice over Germany, twice over Brazil, a string of wide-area sightings that included Connecticut and seven neighboring states plus Ontario, and Louisiana and five more. Bright meteors over four continents at a pace of roughly one confirmed event every few days.

The standout came in the small hours of June 15, when a fireball crossed the sky over Missouri and stayed visible across seventeen other US states before fading. The American Meteor Society logged 527 separate witness reports for that single event, one of the most widely observed fireballs anywhere so far this year. Keep an eye on the sky.

All this and more in our SOTT Earth Changes Summary for June 2026:

To understand why these events fit a coherent pattern of solar-driven, cyclic catastrophe rather than the official anthropogenic narrative, check out our book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection. Previous installments in this series, translated into multiple languages, are available on our channel.