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New Shocking Evidence: Earth’s Magnetic Field Changes Rapidly New Study Shows (+Video)
New Shocking Evidence: Earth’s Magnetic Field Changes Rapidly
We think of north and south as being pretty constant, but the Earth’s magnetic field has flipped many times throughout the planet’s history. http://tinyurl.com/ja52snc
The Earth’s magnetic field is dipole, like that of a magnet, which means it has two opposite poles. Usually this magnetic field maintains the same intensity for thousands to million of years, but for unknown reasons, it occasionally weakens and reverses direction, a process that scientists previously thought took thousands of years.
But now scientists have discovered that the last magnetic reversal happened 786,000 years ago, and it actually occurred very quickly, within around 100 years. This means north and south could swap positions in the span of a human lifetime, which is pretty crazy to think about.
The international study was led by scientists at the University of California Berkeley in the US, and examined sediment layers in an ancient lake in the Sulmona basin east of Rome, Italy. The results are published in Geophysical Journal International.
http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/content/199/2/1110.full
US BERKELEY – Earth’s magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime
http://tinyurl.com/hqucw86
The results show that not only did the flip occur a lot quicker than we previously thought, it was also preceded by a period of magnetic instability that lasted around 6,000 years.
That’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds – there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals. But there would be some major issues – for starters, the pole flip could wreak havoc on our electrical grid, and could possibly even take it down altogether.
And because the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays, the reduction of the magnetic field before the reversal could lead to increased rates of cancer.
The danger would be even greater if the flip was preceded by long periods of unstable magnetic behaviour – which occurred in the latest pole flip. The truth is, however, we know very little about what the effect of a pole reversal would be, but it’s time we started to find out, and this new data will help us better understand the process.
ScienceAlert.com
Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/ja52snc
Earth’s magnetic field protects us from solar storms and cosmic rays. Less magnetism means more radiation can penetrate our planet’s atmosphere. http://spaceweather.com/
Clips, images credit: ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA
Image credit: NASA
