Geologists began to express concern about the magnetic field protecting the Earth from deadly solar radiation in 2019, when the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was forced to update its global magnetic model a year earlier after discovering the magnetic north pole was rapidly moving out of the Canadian Arctic. towards Siberia.
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is tracking a huge, growing, and slowly cracking “dent” in the Earth’s magnetic field.
The area, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, is located in the southern hemisphere between South America and the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of southwestern Africa.
According to recent monitoring and simulations from NASA, this area is expanding westward and getting weaker, and is expected to split completely into two separate cells in the near future, each of which will stretch thousands of kilometers across.
NASA says the weakening of the magnetic field in this area threatens to allow more solar radiation to approach the Earth’s surface, shutting off electronics or temporarily incapacitating satellites and other human-made space-based objects that pass through it.
Last year, a rapid shift in the coordinates of the magnetic north from the Canadian Arctic towards Siberia prompted some scientists to express fears that the Earth could face a reversal of the magnetic north and south poles. It is believed that the last such reversal took place about 780,000 years ago, and scientists still do not fully understand how such a phenomenon will affect the magnetic field.
Even with a constant magnetic field, human civilization remains vulnerable to sudden bursts of powerful solar radiation. In 2011, US scientists warned that a repeat of a solar storm like the one that hit the Earth in 1859 could cause up to $ 2 trillion in initial damage, damaging electrical grids, satellites, navigation systems, etc.