“The field may be decreasing rapidly, but we are not yet down to the long-term average”.
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A recent study from Stanford University investigates the potential of a recent conspiracy theory which suggests a “fast-approaching switch of the Earth’s magnetic poles” to determine no such thing will occur; at least not any time soon.
During the study, the researchers observed changes in the Earth’s volcanic rock, by noting down the manner in which its iron-bearing minerals align with the magnetic field of Earth. Over the past couple of hundred years, the strength of the Earth’s geomagnetic field has been fading.
After the past research’s release, some scientists started wondering if earth’s polarity could flip.
But now scientists said the field’s intensity may simply be coming down from an abnormal high rather than approaching a reversal.
It’s been a popular scenario of the “our planet is trying to murder us” set, with a worry that the flip could weaken the magnetic field and bombard us with solar flares and cosmic rays while we’re unprotected. The findings published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences violate the existing studies that revealed that the process of flipping is weakening the geomagnetic field.
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The planet’s core generates the Earth’s magnetic field and helps keep potentially risky energized particles from space going into the atmosphere. There will be an increase in harmful solar radiations, which could lead to serious health outcomes. Some biologists fear that direct exposure to harmful solar radiations may even result in mass extinctions. This means that the field is still unusually strong. “Even if the [field intensity] is dropping, we still have a long buffer that we can comfortably rely on”, Huapei Wang, an one of the post-docs who worked on the study, said in an MIT statement. This drop in intensity is associated with periodic geomagnetic field reversals, in which the Earth’s North and South magnetic poles flip polarity, and it could last for several thousand years before returning to a stable, shielding intensity.
