Earth’s magnetic poles could start to flip. What happens then?
As Earth's magnetic shield fails, so do its satellites. First, our communications satellites in the highest orbits go down. Next, astronauts in low-Earth orbit can no longer phone home. And finally, cosmic rays start to bombard every human on Earth.
07 December 2018
By Jonathan O'Callaghan
This is a possibility that we may start to face not in the next million years, not in the next thousand, but in the next hundred. If Earth’s magnetic field were to decay significantly, it could collapse altogether and flip polarity – changing magnetic north to south and vice versa. The consequences of this process could be dire for our planet.
Most worryingly, we may be headed right for this scenario.
‘The geomagnetic field has been decaying for the last 3,000 years,’ said Dr Nicolas Thouveny from the European Centre for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France. ‘If it continues to fall down at this rate, in less than one millennium we will be in a critical (period).’
Dr Thouveny is one of the principal investigators on the five-year
EDIFICE project, which has been running since 2014. Together with his colleagues, he has been investigating the history of Earth’s magnetic field, including when it has reversed in the past, and when it might again.