The study, launched by scientists at the British University of Leeds and the University of California, America, reveals a new vision of the rotating flow of iron at a distance of 2800 km below the surface of the earth, as well as how it affects the movement of the planet's magnetic field in the last hundred thousand years. The study was published in the British journal Nature Communications.
The planet's magnetic field is produced by the heat load flows of the molten metal forming the Earth's outer core. The movement of liquid iron creates electric currents that power a global field that helps navigation systems, protect life on Earth from radiation from outside the planet, while stabilizing the atmosphere.
The Earth's magnetic field is constantly changing, and satellites have given us a new ability to track its shifts, but it exists long before we know how to record its data. This causes scientists to consider the influence of magnetic fields on sediments, lava flows and human-made artefacts, to capture information about the evolution of the field and study its behavior again through geological time.
Simulation
It is not easy to accurately track the signal from the Earth’s core, so the estimated field change rates through sediment analysis remain highly controversial, prompting Assistant Professor Chris Davis from Leeds University and Professor Dr. Catherine Constable from Scripps Institution of Oceanography from the University of California at San Diego to Take a new approach, combining computer simulations of the magnetic field generation process with a published study on reconstructing temporal changes in the Earth's magnetic field over the past 100,000 years.
Their new study showed that shifts in the Earth's magnetic field occurred at rates 10 times higher than the current rate of changes, which is one degree per year. Rapid changes are associated with a local weakness of the magnetic field.
Changes in the Earth's magnetic field occur at the polarity reversal or during geomagnetic deviations. This is when the dipole axis - which corresponds to the field lines flowing from one polar and converging to the other, moves away from locations usually known as north and south geographic.
The most obvious examples in their study showed a sharp change in the direction of the geomagnetic field by about 2.5 degrees per year, 39,000 years ago, a shift associated with the local weakness of field strength in a spatial region confined near the west coast of Central America, and the transformation occurred after the global chimp deflection; It is a short reflection of the magnetic field that occurred 41,000 years ago; According to the Interstering Engineering website.
Future searches for rapid changes in direction will focus on low latitude regions, as the team's comprehensive analysis showed that the fastest changes are related to the movement of reverse flow spots along the surface of the liquid core, which is prevalent at lower latitudes.
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