Flaring refers to several distinct phenomena depending on context. In medicine, it describes a temporary spike in symptoms during a chronic illness. In the oil and gas industry, it means the controlled burning of excess natural gas. And in space weather, solar flares are bursts of energy from the sun’s surface. Each type of flaring has real consequences for human health, safety, or infrastructure, and understanding the differences matters.
Medical Flares: When Chronic Symptoms Spike
A medical flare, or flare-up, is an episode of increased disease severity in a chronic condition. Autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia are particularly known for cycling between flares and remissions, periods when symptoms calm down or disappear. During a flare, the immune system’s attack on healthy tissue intensifies, often without an obvious reason.
The underlying biology involves a tug-of-war between two types of immune cells. Autoimmune effector cells, the ones causing damage, rise sharply during a flare. This triggers a delayed response from regulatory cells that work to suppress the attack. Once the regulatory cells gain the upper hand, the flare ends and symptoms subside. The cycle can repeat when something tips the balance again.
What Triggers a Flare
Infections are one of the most common triggers, since they activate the immune system in ways that can spill over into autoimmune activity. Stress is another major factor, working through hormonal and nervous system pathways to shift immune function. Environmental exposures, certain medications, and viruses can also set off a flare in people who are genetically susceptible. Sometimes flares appear to happen randomly, which researchers model as biological “noise” pushing the immune system past a tipping point.
Managing a Flare
There is no single protocol that works for everyone during a flare. The most important thing to understand is that flares are temporary, even when they feel overwhelming. Changing medications isn’t always the right first step, since many treatments need time to reach effective levels. Instead, managing a flare often involves adjusting physical activity (staying active but avoiding overexertion), planning rest into your daily routine, and using relaxation techniques like breathing exercises or meditation. Strengthening social support also plays a measurable role. Treatment plans work best when tailored to the individual, since people respond differently to the same approaches.
Gas Flaring: Burning Excess Natural Gas
In the oil and gas industry, flaring is the deliberate burning of natural gas that comes to the surface during oil extraction. When crude oil is pumped from underground, gas often comes up with it. If there’s no pipeline or processing facility to capture that gas, operators burn it off at the wellsite through a controlled flame, typically visible as a bright orange tower of fire.
Safety is the primary justification. Extracting oil and gas involves dealing with exceptionally high and changeable pressures. A sudden pressure spike could cause an explosion, and safety flaring allows operators to rapidly depressurize equipment by burning off excess gas. The associated gas can also contain harmful pollutants, and burning it destroys most toxic compounds before they reach the atmosphere.
Environmental and Health Costs
The problem is that flaring is far less clean than industry has assumed. Governments and oil companies have long estimated that flares destroy 98% of the methane they burn. Airborne sampling across three major US gas-producing regions found the real number is closer to 91%, meaning methane emissions from flaring are roughly five times higher than official estimates suggest. Some flares are inefficient, and others go out entirely without anyone noticing, releasing unburned gas straight into the atmosphere. This unaccounted methane represents 4 to 10% of total US oil and gas methane emissions.
For people living near flaring sites, the health effects are significant. Emissions from flaring increase rates of respiratory disease, heart disease, and stroke due to fine particle exposure. Research in the Eagle Ford Shale region found an association between flaring activity and increased risk of preterm birth. In North Dakota, flaring was linked to more respiratory-related hospital visits. Across the US, flaring and venting emissions cause an estimated 710 premature deaths and 73,000 childhood asthma attacks annually, with health damages valued at over $7.4 billion per year.
In response, the World Bank launched the Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 initiative in 2015, bringing together governments, oil companies, and development agencies with the goal of eliminating routine flaring by the end of the decade. The distinction matters: safety flaring during emergencies would still be permitted, but the everyday practice of burning gas simply because there’s no infrastructure to capture it is the target.
Solar Flares: Energy Bursts From the Sun
A solar flare is a sudden release of energy from the sun’s surface, triggered when powerful magnetic fields in active regions (often near sunspots) become unstable and reconnect. The resulting burst of electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light and can reach Earth in about eight minutes.
Solar flares are classified on a scale similar to earthquake magnitudes, where each level represents a tenfold increase in energy. From weakest to strongest, the classes are A, B, C, M, and X. Within each class, a finer scale runs from 1 to 9, so an M5 flare is five times more intense than an M1. The X class has no upper cap: flares above X9 simply keep counting upward.
How Different Classes Affect Earth
C-class flares are too weak to noticeably affect Earth. M-class flares can cause brief radio blackouts near the poles and minor radiation storms that pose some risk to astronauts. X-class flares are where consequences get serious. A strong X-class flare can create long-lasting radiation storms that damage satellites, expose high-altitude airline passengers near the poles to small radiation doses, and potentially cause worldwide radio blackouts and power grid disruptions.
NOAA rates the practical impact using a radio blackout scale from R1 (minor, triggered by M1 flares) through R5 (extreme, triggered by X20 or higher flares). At the R5 level, high-frequency radio communication can be completely blacked out on the entire sunlit side of Earth for hours, and GPS navigation signals can degrade significantly.