Ladies and Gentlemen, according to the Perspective Research Department scientists have discovered that Earth’s magnetic field could flip from north to south at any time!
Estimates range from next week, to more than a hundred years from now ………………, but rest assured it will flip soon!
BUT!
A magnetic field shift is old news.
Around 800,000 years ago, magnetic north hovered over Antarctica and reindeer lived in magnetic south.
(The poles have flipped several times throughout Earth’s history.)
Scientists have estimated that a flip cycle starts with the magnetic field weakening over the span of a few thousand years, then the poles flip and the field springs back up to full strength again.
However, a new study shows that the last time the Earth’s poles flipped, it only took 100 years for the reversal to happen.
The
Earth’s magnetic field is in a weakening stage right now. Data
collected this summer by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite
suggests the field is weakening 10 times faster than scientists
originally thought.
They predicted a flip could come within the next hundred years.
“We don’t know whether the next reversal will occur
as suddenly as this [previous] one did, but we also don’t know that it
won’t,” Paul Renne, director of the Geochronology Center at the
University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
Geologists still are not sure what causes the planet’s magnetic field to flip direction. Earth’s iron core acts like a giant magnet and generates the magnetic field that envelops the planet.
This helps protect against blasts of radiation that erupt from the sun and sometimes hurtle toward Earth.
A weakening magnetic field could interrupt power grids and radio communication, and douse the planet in unusually high levels of radiation.
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