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Bad News for Earth's Magnetic Field

Posted by timothy on from the or-at-least-fans-of-it dept.

jabex writes "Scientific American's website has an article about the overdue magnetic field flip. According to research published in the journal Nature, it could take anywhere from 2000-10000 years to complete. That's a long time without a protective magnetic field."

1 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Dipole to quadrupole to reversal... by lcde · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't find the article on google right now, but the last time i read about this in between the reversal of earths magnetic pole it turns into a quadrupole or higher order for a couple of hundreds of years then it finishes.

    Still we won't lose our magnetic field unless our core solidifies, but a field reversal or a higher order magnetic field will allow different polorization of solar winds and other EM noise that would be different that what we have now. We also might not be as well protected against the solar flares during the sun's cycle.

    --
    :%s/teh/the/g