NASA is Watching a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field
upstart writes:
NASA Is Watching a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field:
NASA has been monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.
[...] The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) - likened by NASA to a 'dent' in Earth's magnetic field, or a kind of 'pothole in space' - generally doesn't affect life on Earth, but the same can't be said for orbital spacecraft (including the International Space Station), which pass directly through the anomaly as they loop around the planet at low-Earth orbit altitudes.
During these encounters, the reduced magnetic field strength inside the anomaly means technological systems onboard satellites can short-circuit and malfunction if they become struck by high-energy protons emanating from the Sun.
These random hits may usually only produce low-level glitches, but they do carry the risk of causing significant data loss, or even permanent damage to key components - threats obliging satellite operators to routinely shut down spacecraft systems before spacecraft enter the anomaly zone.
[...] "The magnetic field is actually a superposition of fields from many current sources," geophysicist Terry Sabaka from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland explained in 2020.
[...] A study published in July 2020 suggested the phenomenon is not a freak event of recent times, but a recurrent magnetic event that may have affected Earth since as far back as 11 million years ago.
If so, that could signal that the South Atlantic Anomaly is not a trigger or precursor to the entire planet's magnetic field flipping, which is something that actually happens, if not for hundreds of thousands of years at a time.
Journal Reference: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/2016SW001525
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