Launched in 2013, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm mission, consisting of three satellites, has provided a decade of invaluable data on Earth’s magnetic field and core dynamics. This data has enabled significant advances in understanding the mechanisms behind the magnetic field’s slow changes, as detailed in a recent ESA-funded project report.
Earth’s magnetic field acts like a protective shield around the planet, repelling and trapping charged particles from the Sun. But over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean, an unusually weak spot in the field – called the South Atlantic…
In a new study, scientists from the University of Liverpool in England traced back the strange behavior of the magnetic field in the South Atlantic region and found that similar anomalies existed as far back as 8 to 11 million years ago. The South Atlantic Anomaly…
A new study published in Nature Communications shows that previous changes in the direction of Earth's magnetic field reached rates that are up to 10 times larger than the fastest currently reported variations of up to one degree per year. The authors combined…
A new study published in Earth and Planetary Science letters supports the concept that the Earth's early magnetic field was generated by its mantle, not its core. A new study conducted by researchers Dave Stegman, Leah Ziegler, and Nicolas Blanc provided more…
A new World Magnetic Model (WMM) was officially released on December 10, 2019. WMM is a representation of the planet’s magnetic field that gives compasses dependable accuracy and one of the key tools developed to model the change in Earth's magnetic field….
Earth and Sun's fields are weakening and we're exiting the magnetic dust cloud. At the same time, our three shields against energy from space are disappearing, we are showing increased vulnerability to space weather from our sun, and cosmic rays are already…
Earth's magnetic field has flipped many times throughout history and is now on its way toward another reversal. While the topic was highly controversial in the 20th century, numerous studies over the past decades have proven this as a fact, that it's…
Scientists have identified patterns in the Earth’s magnetic field that evolve on the order of 1 000 years, providing new insight into how the field works and adding a measure of predictability to changes in the field not previously known. The discovery also…
If you could travel back in time 41 000 years to the last ice age, your compass would point south instead of north. That’s because for a period of a few hundred years, the Earth’s magnetic field was reversed. Magnetic reversals have happened repeatedly…
