© Science ABC
In an area stretching from Africa to South America,
Earth's magnetic field is gradually weakening. This strange behaviour has geophysicists puzzled and is causing technical disturbances in satellites orbiting Earth. Scientists are using data from ESA's Swarm constellation to improve our understanding of this area known as the 'South Atlantic Anomaly.'
Earth's magnetic field is vital to life on our planet. It is a complex and dynamic force that protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun. The magnetic field is largely generated by an ocean of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up the outer core around 3000 km beneath our feet. Acting as a spinning conductor in a bicycle dynamo, it creates electrical currents, which in turn, generate our continuously changing electromagnetic field.
This field is far from static and varies both in strength and direction. For example,
recent studies have shown that the position of the north magnetic pole is changing rapidly.
Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.
From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa - indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.
Earth's magnetic field is often visualised as a powerful dipolar bar magnet at the centre of the planet, tilted at around 11° to the axis of rotation. However, the growth of the South Atlantic Anomaly indicates that the processes involved in generating the field are far more complex. Simple dipolar models are unable to account for the recent development of the second minimum.
© ESA/ATG MedialabSwarm constellation
Scientists from the Swarm Data, Innovation and Science Cluster (DISC) are using data from
ESA's Swarm satellite constellation to better understand this anomaly. Swarm satellites are designed to identify and precisely measure the different magnetic signals that make up Earth's magnetic field.
Jürgen Matzka, from the German Research Centre for Geosciences, says, "The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously. We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth's core driving these changes."
It has been speculated whether the current weakening of the field is a sign that Earth is heading for an eminent pole reversal - in which the north and south magnetic poles switch places. Such events have occurred many times throughout the planet's history and even though we are long overdue by the average rate at which these reversals take place (roughly every 250 000 years), the intensity dip in the South Atlantic occurring now is well within what is considered normal levels of fluctuations.
At surface level, the South Atlantic Anomaly presents no cause for alarm. However, satellites and other spacecraft flying through the area are more likely to experience technical malfunctions as the magnetic field is weaker in this region, so charged particles can penetrate the altitudes of low-Earth orbit satellites.
The mystery of the origin of the South Atlantic Anomaly has yet to be solved. However, one thing is certain: magnetic field observations from Swarm are providing exciting new insights into the scarcely understood processes of Earth's interior.
Playpen science under lockdown?
Is it not widely known that so called magnetosphere is a direct response to the fluctuations of Solar capacitance (wind)? The Solar condition is itself nested in a greater environment.
The theory of molten iron generating a magnetic field has no basis in fact.
While iron magnifies the electro-magnetic field, heating iron is the way to demagnetise it.
Beliefs are like life forms that feed on the energy and attention given them.
This does not have to be conscious and generally, a belief runs as a automatic status of internalised habit.
The habit is thus an invisible belief that automatically reiterates and self reinforces.
A mind running habits is a habit running mind.
This reversal seems to be a mind unto itself, socially isolated, locked down and masked in narratives that protect the established habit. But without a wider field of connections, its apparent gain of function in control, operates a weakening and fragmenting loss of true functionality.
Human consciousness is erasing itself by explanations of un-Reason, that generate stagnant dead beliefs as a kind of cargo cult seeking to draw energy, authority or support for reality by going through the motions and props of a 'golden age' when beliefs were young and full of promise.
There is a true function for belief - but not as a prop for a lack of relational honesty and connection.
Step forth in what you accept yourself to be as your working belief but don't make it your home and lock down in the mask of its perspective. Transparency to truth is not a proprietary or patentable possession or control.
The willingness to renewal in life opens innocent perception.
If we have already decided what to see, how to frame or contextualise it and what meaning we draw from and thus share in, then we are not really here, in this 'togetherness' of fluctuating charge relations that life unfolds meaning from, rather than imposing habit meanings upon.
The imposition of masking meanings makes for a progressive entanglement in polarised fragmentation, that locks in and locks down as structure under which no life can move. This experience of compression activates the drawing to seed for a new breath or expansion. But the attempt to contract the field of relation as a means of protecting control habits, uses death or life-denial as a sorcery of leverage. Limiting consciousness in exchange for illusion of control strips life of meaning, that is not IN beliefs but in love, peace, joy, and the qualities of life that are the primary movement of being within Itself - given expression and embodiment in our lives. Symbols and conceptual derivatives taken in place of felt and shared qualities of life operate as belief thiefs.
Life is not waiting to be explained by novel discovery, but gives itself wholly to the willingness to be-lived truly.
When toxic debts catch up with us, we have run out of time in which to cast them elsewhere and elsewhen.
Release and be released, allows what doesn't belong to fall away - instead of being negatively charged as a basis for counter belief. But the restoration to a true and present connection holds the quality of peace in being that outer conditions cannot explain Nor need to.