Scientists worry about "weakening of magnetic field", say scientists

17:57 25.04.2019(update 18:50 25.04.2019) Get a short URL

A new study claims to have solved a mystery that has left scientists scratching their heads since 1978.

Researchers from the Institute of Earth Physics and the Technical University of Denmark, based in Paris, have conducted what might well prove to be a revolutionary new research on the movement of superhot liquid metal at the heart of the Earth, which would be at the origin of the powerful "jerks" swinging the planet and temporarily weakening its magnetic field every few years.

Scientists have used supercomputers to create a very detailed model of the base metal movement. Successfully aligning their simulations on the saccades observed by scientists, they found that these saccades could be caused by drops of molten material floating towards the crust. In doing so, these drops create powerful waves along the magnetic field lines, affecting the flow of liquid governing the magnetosphere and turning into saccades in the magnetic field above the planet.

The scientists who conducted the research, Julien Aubert and Christopher C. Finlay, summed up the implications of their work in an article in Nature, noting that "the digital shaking ability offers a new way to probe the physical properties of the deep interior of the Earth ". . The authors hoped that their work could help scientists better predict the behavior of the Earth's geomagnetic field, predict future shocks and their effect on other geodynamic processes.

Scientists first described the phenomenon of geomagnetic shaking in 1978, one of the first such tremors being documented in 1969, temporarily deforming the magnetic field of Western Europe. . But until now, the researchers had not reached a consensus on why the saccadas were occurring, even though it had been assumed that they were from the core of the planet.

It is believed that the Earth's magnetic field is generated by a concept called "geodynamo", a mechanism that allows the planet to generate a magnetic field by the heat generated by the movement of conductive liquid metal within the nucleus, supplemented by the rotation of the planet as it moves around the Sun.

The scientific community has recently been somewhat frightened by rumors that the Earth's magnetic field was weakening, perhaps dangerously, after the announcement earlier this year that the North Magnetic Pole was leaving the Canadian Arctic to reach an accelerated pace in Russian Siberia. Without the field, the Earth would remain vulnerable to solar flares, which, when sufficiently intense, could cause considerable damage to human-made infrastructure, including spacecraft and satellites orbiting the earth. Earth up to the power grids on the planet itself. In 2011, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States calculated that a repeat of a solar storm such as that which hit the Earth in 1859 could cause up to $ 2 trillion of initial damage and repair for more than a decade.