Reddington
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Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?
Earth's Magnetic field has flipped direction 183 times over the past 84 million years. A little more than once per half a million years. The last full geomagnetic reversal was over 700,000 years ago.
Earth has a literal deflector shield. A geomagnetic field. Lines of magnetic force, forged by currents in the planet’s molten core, erupt from the surface close to the north south geographic poles, connecting to each other to wreath the planet in a dipole field, like a gigantic bar magnet.
Magnetic fields exert a force on moving charged particles, causing them to spiral around those force lines. That’s helpful, because Earth is constantly bombarded by very fast moving charged particles, especially coming from the Sun. Our magnetic field deflects the worst of these. Not all planets are so lucky. Mars, with its solid core, has no such shield – and so the red planet’s atmosphere was stripped away by the solar wind billions of years ago.
Earth's Magnetic field has flipped direction 183 times over the past 84 million years. A little more than once per half a million years. The last full geomagnetic reversal was over 700,000 years ago.
Earth has a literal deflector shield. A geomagnetic field. Lines of magnetic force, forged by currents in the planet’s molten core, erupt from the surface close to the north south geographic poles, connecting to each other to wreath the planet in a dipole field, like a gigantic bar magnet.
Magnetic fields exert a force on moving charged particles, causing them to spiral around those force lines. That’s helpful, because Earth is constantly bombarded by very fast moving charged particles, especially coming from the Sun. Our magnetic field deflects the worst of these. Not all planets are so lucky. Mars, with its solid core, has no such shield – and so the red planet’s atmosphere was stripped away by the solar wind billions of years ago.