Swarm satellites probe weakening of Earth’s magnetic field
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The South Atlantic Anomaly is interesting. In past years satellites are being made to shutdown while passing the regions to avoid damage from the lack of protection from harmful particles.
It seems to cover almost whole South America.
For that reason, it is not a popular orbit unless there is a larger driver behind the selection. For example the ISS goes right through it in order to be above Russia for a reasonable portion of its orbit. I believe Astronauts have reported increases in optical flashes during this part of the orbit as more energetic particles pass through their eyes.
It's not often mentioned but these pole reversals aren't sudden/instantaneous across the planet. They can take a few thousand years to complete.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
The most interesting part to me, from the Wikipedia page is:
> The magnetic field will not vanish completely, but many poles might form chaotically in different places during reversal, until it stabilizes again.
We could get something like that for Earth if our field is out for maintenance for a while.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245369-nasa-proposes-bui...
I've actually seen that fact mentioned quite often within articles and news regarding pole flips as a reassurance to the reader.
"The magnetic field will not vanish completely, but many poles might form chaotically in different places during reversal, until it stabilizes again."
The field would not vanish completely but most of the world would lack protection from massively dangerous cosmic radiations and solar particles.
The process would only take a mere million years or so!
In the meantime the Earths atmosphere alone also blocks cosmic radiation to the extent that there's no immediate harm to life.
"The Ends of the World" is probably the best one. "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs" is also a good one, and it doesn't focus purely on the dinosaurs as the title suggests, but about how we know how they evolved and existed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
It doesn’t look like magnetic pole reversals cause mass extinctions.
So we'll hopefully have hundreds of years, if not thousands of years to prepare.
http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/V2050/pdf/8250.pdf
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
If things truly get bad, we are not entirely out of options (though powering the aforementioned shield might be somewhat difficult).
Space-based X-ray telescopes also need to take the South Atlantic Anomaly into account; data taken while the instrument is in the SAA is disregarded.
And if so, is it opening the possibility of having northern lights in the middle of the Atlantic?
Maybe with northern lights over equator, I'd have to think about it more, but it's odd to think of an aurora where the magnetic field lines are parallel with the ground rather than normal to the ground (particles are much more mobile along field lines rather than across field lines in plasmas).
When space weather activity increases and more frequent and larger storms and substorms occur, the aurora extends equatorward. During large events, the aurora can be observed as far south as the US, Europe, and Asia. During very large events, the aurora can be observed even farther from the poles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_North_Ameri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Kp_Map_Eurasia.gif
Now if you start seeing Auroras in Lisbon or Miami please let me know!
Portugal might be more northern than you think. It's only just south of Toronto.
Although the name Swarm conjures up a large number of satellites it is actually only 3 that make up the constellation:
Does any human activity impact Earth's magnetic field directly or is it irrelevant at this scale? Activity like mining metals out of the planet, large amounts of construction. Movement of metal in ways of air planes and vehicles.
If molten magma is the source of our magnetic field and the earth slowly spews out lava over time, is it causing out magnetic field to weaken over time?
This might be slightly offtopic but what do you make of the concept that magnetic fields and global warming might be associated? [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AGUFMGP51B..02F/abstra...
That is ENTIRELY insignificant, and not even worth mentioning. The deepest hole humans have ever been able to create was about 12km deep. That is less than 0.18% of the earth‘s radius.
Human activity is limited to the upper parts of earth‘s crust, which is itself only a fraction of earth. Magnetism happens WAAAAAY deeper.
This interesting: We've sent humans 384400 km away from our planet, we've sent an object more than 22E9 km away [1], yet we cannot drill a hole deeper than 12 km into our own planet.
It's hard to engineer materials or machinery that can cope with the kind of pressures and temperatures created when drilling deeper than a few kilometres.
Also pouring government funds into something like this is not as glamourous as manned space flight missions. A good example is that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we know about the ecosystems in the Mariana trench.
But doesn't that assume that metal/mineral deposits closer to the surface, or at the surface, those that humanity has mostly exploited, do have no effect at all?
What if surface deposits and those closer to it act as some kind of "coating" leading to slight changes in dynamics we still don't understand or might not even realize yet actually exist? When we are very much like ants: In the singular seemingly insignificant, a single ant would never be seen as capable as "harvesting" any bigger animal carcass. Yet the scale and endurance of these ants make it possible for them to slowly pick apart something that would normally consider them quite insignificant in their actions, very much like we've been doing for a very long time.
In that context, I'm kinda skeptical about how often the impact of human activity is belittled as supposedly having an "insignificant" contribution to global-scale environmental changes. Reminds me way too much about how climate change is to this day still argued as something "natural", and many past human activities that were declared "safe and inconsequential" at the time, ended up still having very real lasting and global effects, like atmospheric nuclear weapon tests.
It makes me wonder how much of that argument is connected to religious beliefs along the lines of "Humans could never seriously threaten or impact God's creation, and if we do, then God intended for it to do so", which sometimes manifests in weird ways like considering environmentalism as a form of "native evil" [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/may/05/eva...
And to note: I'm not saying that's actually a thing, what I'm taking issue with is these reflexive declarations of human activity supposedly being "too insignificant" as regularly being the go-to answer to many environmental changes and issues to categorically deny human activity as having any and all influence on them.
Imho that's just short-sighted and belittles how often we have been absolutely wrong with that kind of approach, only to then later having to admit "We fucked up and now there's not really a way to fix it, our bad".
Because contrary to popular belief, not even 21st-century humanity is without flaws, we are not omniscient, even when quite often pretend to be to justify that kind of false hubris of "insignificant human activity".
That's what I take issue with, I'm not arguing that changes to the magnetic field are without a doubt the result of human activity, I'm merely taking issue with how quickly and nonchalantly such possibilities are hand-waved away with "human activity is just too insignificant".
When by now it turns out human activity has been significant enough to kick-off a process that can be very much described as "terraforming", or rather "venusforming" terra.
The theory that I heard was that it was the end of "snowball earth" that drove it.
But https://www.nature.com/news/what-sparked-the-cambrian-explos... suggests that your version is better supported by current research.
I still feel an irrational sense of alarm.
:)
Geologist of the time did not believe a word of it. However, during WW2 the detecting instrumentation for submarine warfare detected on the sea floor alternating bands of magnetic polarization, which is now evidence for the reversal of the magnetic poles. Humans do have non-physical experiences, e.g. dreams, etc. but now most non-physical experience is discounted, ignored, except for thinking.
Geophysicist Motonori Matuyama talked about geomagnetic reversals in the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonori_Matuyama
> When there is a shifting of the poles. Or a new cycle begins.
He actually is not talking about magnetic poles. He clarifies further:
"There will be shifting then of the poles – so that where there has been those of a frigid or the semi-tropical will become the more tropical, and moss and fern will grow. And these will begin in those periods in ‘58 to ‘98, when these will be proclaimed as the periods when His light will be seen again in the clouds. As to times, as to seasons, as to places, alone is it given to those who have named the name – and who bear the mark of those of His calling and His election in their bodies. To them it shall be given." - https://www.edgarcayce.org/about-us/blog/blog-posts/cayces-p...
> Geologist of the time did not believe a word of it.
I mean, did anybody ask them? Perhaps they would have been familiar with Professor Matuyama's work.
Finally, how many other predictions did he make? Any chance people have cherry-picked a couple of his ideas that seem kind of close to right?
It's not enough to have a belief. At the very least, you need a logical derivation of your theory.
If I threw out a prediction in this comment that just happened to become true in 100 years, should I get any credit for it? Should people think that I somehow had some special insight? No.
Logic & evidence. Those are the only things of value when make claims or predictions.
Basically our galaxy is a spiral galaxy with four arms, and it's rotating. The center moves slower than the outside, and our sun's orbit is near the inner rim of the Orion arm. We orbit the galaxy roughly every 240 million years and in that time we cross the dense galactic arms every so often (arms aren't symmetrical).
The paper: "A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events."
It's gonna be a bad time, man.
Edit: I shouldn't have posted it.
GPS systems will no longer work and Google Maps will spin around constantly.
Only babies (and crows) will need to live underground for the first 6 months of their lives to ensure they don't develop vertico.
I'm not sure what you responded to since it was removed, but I assume it was something to do with the subject of the article...
Why would all magnets cease to work if the Earth's magnetic field went funky? Surely neither the magnets on my fridge nor the magnets in a train's electric traction motors do not depend on the earth's magnetic field being oriented any particular direction. I'm not sure, but I think AC train traction motors don't even have permanent magnets in them. Compasses would get messed up though.
If that's true (although I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen) then our use of coal, oil and gas will eventually have serious effects?
What are you possibly basing this on?
"I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen"
Well, it's not a fire...
Parent post is just wrong since we know how those processes work
I'd wager that all the crude fossil fuels in the world might be able to have a minor impact on a single decently sized volcano if it were all in one spot beneath it, but it's not.
The views above are primarily opinion formed off the cuff combined with a few minutes of research. I'm open to being shown that I am incorrect.
Earth seems to have been just fine without hydrocarbons for most of its existence.
If so we need to change economic system to one based on nature. So that eco systems have an economic value. Ie a tree in Amazonas has a value to earth and its inhabitants since it provides oxygen. In current market economic system common resources are not priced fully. It may be profitable to chop down tree and sell the wood. Use previous Amazonas land for example to create more farmland to breed cows.
"What is causing this?"
Well... that's exactly the point, right? No one knows what's causing it.
Magnetism is driven by Earth’s core.