I know. This sounds like a plot of a 1950’s scifi movie. But it is real. From my view, our localized corner of the solar system is now different than it used to be and changes in the magnetic interactions are evident everywhere. First we have the interplanetary magnetic field that took an abrupt dive in October 2005 and has not recovered since and remains at very low level:
click for a larger image
Then we have the recent discovery that the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.
We have a solar cycle 24 (driven by the solar magnetic dynamo) which can’t seem to get out of the starting gate, being a year late with forecasts for activity from it being revised again and again.
And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth’s magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars.
Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We’d do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate. – Anthony
From NASA News (h/t to Geoff Sharp)
Dec. 16, 2008: NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth’s magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to “load up” the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”
The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance.
Right: One of the THEMIS probes exploring the space around Earth, an artist’s concept. [more]
“The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself,” says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li’s colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says “1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that’s a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible.”
The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open. The cracking was accomplished by means of a process called “magnetic reconnection.” High above Earth’s poles, solar and terrestrial magnetic fields linked up (reconnected) to form conduits for solar wind. Conduits over the Arctic and Antarctic quickly expanded; within minutes they overlapped over Earth’s equator to create the biggest magnetic breach ever recorded by Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
Above: A computer model of solar wind flowing around Earth’s magnetic field on June 3, 2007. Background colors represent solar wind density; red is high density, blue is low. Solid black lines trace the outer boundaries of Earth’s magnetic field. Note the layer of relatively dense material beneath the tips of the white arrows; that is solar wind entering Earth’s magnetic field through the breach. Credit: Jimmy Raeder/UNH. [larger image]
The size of the breach took researchers by surprise. “We’ve seen things like this before,” says Raeder, “but never on such a large scale. The entire day-side of the magnetosphere was open to the solar wind.”
The circumstances were even more surprising. Space physicists have long believed that holes in Earth’s magnetosphere open only in response to solar magnetic fields that point south. The great breach of June 2007, however, opened in response to a solar magnetic field that pointed north.
“To the lay person, this may sound like a quibble, but to a space physicist, it is almost seismic,” says Sibeck. “When I tell my colleagues, most react with skepticism, as if I’m trying to convince them that the sun rises in the west.”
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Here is why they can’t believe their ears: The solar wind presses against Earth’s magnetosphere almost directly above the equator where our planet’s magnetic field points north. Suppose a bundle of solar magnetism comes along, and it points north, too. The two fields should reinforce one another, strengthening Earth’s magnetic defenses and slamming the door shut on the solar wind. In the language of space physics, a north-pointing solar magnetic field is called a “northern IMF” and it is synonymous with shields up!
“So, you can imagine our surprise when a northern IMF came along and shields went down instead,” says Sibeck. “This completely overturns our understanding of things.”
Northern IMF events don’t actually trigger geomagnetic storms, notes Raeder, but they do set the stage for storms by loading the magnetosphere with plasma. A loaded magnetosphere is primed for auroras, power outages, and other disturbances that can result when, say, a CME (coronal mass ejection) hits.
The years ahead could be especially lively. Raeder explains: “We’re entering Solar Cycle 24. For reasons not fully understood, CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the storm gets underway. It’s the perfect sequence for a really big event.”
Sibeck agrees. “This could result in stronger geomagnetic storms than we have seen in many years.”
For more information about the THEMIS mission, visit http://nasa.gov/themis
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well it’s an ice age here in Seattle right now. With RECORD snow fall and winds. I think the winds are 35-40 MPH right now.
We’re screwed. Mother Nature is going to b*tch slap us to the ice age.
hmm. Guess its a good thing I have a parka.
But will there be wolves roaming down town? <>
Are these changes man-made? have we been excavating specific raw materials that are affecting the core iron rotation?
Hadn’t it been for the fact, yes fact, that this been spoken by older scientists to be a possibility when ever the poles +/- change it’s place, then I too would have been buffeled and worried. But as was said the other day by a scientist here, the breach isn’t as dangerous as it sounds.
The last time this happened was 700.000 BP (Before Present). In one blogg here in Sweden an article from ‘Ny Teknik’ was quoted in full. Article: http://hem.passagen.se/icca/NyTarkiv98/1498-polbyte.htm
As said there the change started 150 years ago and computer models show that a change is to take place after a while every times this happens.
So, not manmade. Happened many times before always before a polarchange. Please observe that change from +/- to the other DOESN’T mean that the Earth change upside down. ONLY that + pol change to – pol and vice versa.
Michael J. Bentley (14:16:06) :
E. M. Smith
Who the heck are you? Been reading your postings which seem pretty well grounded in a plethora of subjects! Interesting reading, keep it up!
Why, thank you! But how does anyone say ‘who they are’?…
The short form is: I’m just ‘some guy’ nobody much ever heard of.
The long form adds: Some Guy you never heard of who has a brain that won’t leave him alone. Things get stuck in it and demand to be kept orderly and consistent. When the puzzle pieces don’t fit right I can’t leave it alone until they get positioned right. I’m pretty sure I’m just a bit shy of obsessive compulsive. Some of the memory advantages, but retaining pretty good social skills. Like most of the geeks in Silicon Valley…
I’ve also been around for more than 1/2 century now (God that looks scary) and in that time you accumulate some experiences. I went out of my way to collect interesting and diverse ones (“This life is NOT a dress rehearsal, TAKE BIG BITES!”) And was raised in a farm town by parents who made sure I was well connected with reality.
Yeah, plethora kind of sums it up… At about 6 or 8 years of age one of my teachers said “no one can know everything” and I took it as a challenge 😉 About 20 years later I had to admit they were right, but by then I’d learned you can know a lot about almosteverything and that was good enough. I like to read encyclopedias for fun. Go figure.
Put these together and you get some areas that are known in detail, lots that are known somewhat, and most all of it kept neatly in order. I also stay studiously away from the areas where I’m a complete idiot 😉 (Don’t ever expect to hear anything from me about Opera, Ballet, almost all art and artists, African food, clothes fashions, and many others…)
Formal education includes a U.C. degree and a Community College teaching credential along with the education theory units needed for a lifetime credential when California was handing them out. (Oh, and a Doctor of Divinity that cost me $20 ;-). I can also put CDP after my name, but nobody every heard of it.
I’m interested in just about everything. Cooking, survival skills, farming, medicine, history, languages, electronics & computing, photography, recreational chemistry, geology, weather and how nuclear physics works. I can reload my own ammo, grow food and prep it for the table, make explosives from scratch, just like I can make bread from scratch or make a radio from scratch (either tube or transistor), and have been known to knit and sew… including sewing up some animals that needed it.
I’ve been slightly blown up once, destroyed a couple of motorcycles, jumped out of an airplane a few times, piloted a glider & landed it 8-), been scuba diving, overhauled a few cars and rebuilt one motorcycle (and a tractor with my Dad) and lived on a 27 foot sail boat for a year+ that I single handed. I’ve helped build a family restaurant and made my own corporation. I’m also a decent shot with guns & bow, and like Karate. I make my own beer and sometimes I’ve written stories and poems that folks tell me are pretty good. I really like stock trading, probably because the demands are so high.
Can you tell that I was a Heinlein fan? With redheads in the family?
Oh, and right now I’m unemployed. Anyone need a slightly compulsive polymath to do, well anything interesting?
So who am I? I wish I knew. Maybe that’s what this life is all about…
E.M.Smith (10:52:05) :
The magnetite that lets critters sense magnetic fields has been found in our brains too. I use any reference to “magnets did {foo}” as a flag for looney toons tin hat arguments coming, so it pains me to suggest this, but maybe, just maybe, we are tied to the magnetosphere in ways we do not ken …
During solar minima (especially deep once) heliosphere gets compressed, this would reflect on the effectiveness of the magnetosphere …. Or maybe not…?!
We need a new Copernicus
It’s totally disingenuous to think of the solar system as the Sun plus a bunch of independent planets and miscellaneous stuff
Truth is — in reality — we are inside the Suns atmosphere and the Sun’s magnetic field — as Sagan said — “We are all made of Star Stuff”
“Our Earth’s Magnetic Field” — is really just the local to the earth region of the “Sun’s much much bigger Magnetic Field” that extends out for hundreds of AU in all directions and is very complex and very dynamic (see Ulysses) — indeed it is incomplete to not include the solar wind, CME’s, etc that change the coupling from one dominated by fields to one dominated by particles
The reason that none of this is commonly discussed is that:
1) its fiendishly complex — and not amenable to modeling
2) its hard for our psychological position to admit once again that in the next level of abstraction in the Copernican hierarchy — we are not quite as important as we’d like to think
This stuff should be a wake-up call to the true scientists amongst the AGW crowd — but don’t hold your breath waiting for a mea culpa from Hansen, etc.
Westy
As for the Stanford “Tree Diggers” — I’ve got one word (well in the parlance of VP-elect Biden) — Younger Dryas
“an event of 1300 70 years duration that terminated abruptly, as evidenced by an 7 C rise in temperature and a twofold increase in accumulation rate, at 11.64 kyr BP…. The transitions…were all remarkably fast, each occurring over a period of a decade or so [Alley et al., 1993]” – see for instance — http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/mayews01/node6.html
We went from Glacial state to non glacial (Holocene period) and then almost dived back into glaciation (temperature wise) in a blink of and eye (on the geologic timescale) and no human activity could possibly be involved
No burning of fossil fuels or rain forest, no spraying deodorant, no tilling of prairie, no draining of swamps
So what triggered the rapid change in global temperature to make a single damped oscillation? — that by the way seems to have triggered the development of civilization!
Westy
Robert Bateman (18:46:34) :
E.M.Smith (00:08:26) :
You are overreading things if you think that I am worried. Crop failures from climate change hit Europe in the early 14th century.
Which were immediately followed by the Black Death and the disappearance of half the population of europe….
Leif, my question: “And if that is so what caused the Little Ice Age?” was not meant as an argument for a solar cause but a genuine question and wascertainly not meant to be a “what else?” argument, as you seems to take it.
The imagination of your reforestation proponent is ludicrous and says something about the peer review process.
Tallbloke (01:32:59) :
Yes, the Black Death and the demise of 1/2 the population of Europe actually happened. So do Hurricanes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, Earthquakes and Volcanoes. The glass of reason I gave you was full, not made up.
It’s not a question of worry, it’s a question of do we care enough to try and warn, like we do with other natural disasters.
Well, do we?
Once i’ve read that stars could get briefly very intense perhaps our sun is responsible for the heating since we are travelleing almost trough the galactic plane making the magnetic fields concentrate on certain regions only in alignment to the galactic equator.
Also does anyone know about the current manhatten project which is currently being done by chemtrails.
I think there is definitely a reversal on the coming the magnetic fields must be gradually weakening and shifting.
The jet stream is also moving worldwide to the poles, this can’t be some kind of coincidence something terribly wrong must be going on and most of all it is being actively suppressed by all governments.
They want to depopulate the entire world by 80 % but they can’t just build concentration camps all over the place this pole shift will make their dream come true of killing almost everyone.
Unless world war 3 kicks in that could also mean the collapse of human kind.
By the way ww2 started with a depression first….
And looking at the recent economic events well ….. you know …….
deflation then inflation then hyperinflation then a white flash followed by a red cloud of 1000 C at 300 miles an hour….
PS: does anyone have good links about nibiru you toube is biased with disinformation videos anyway.
pitt bull
Your dealer must be better than mine…
Not better just a bit faster
The cloud bands of Venus were brought up by my Astronomy Professor as the most puzzling of all the planetary atmospheres. They start at the ternimator all pointing to the equator, then rapidly shift to straight across.
The theory being that at night, the jet streams are transporting the equatorial heat to the poles, but during the heating of the day, the energy absorbed sends them straight across. I may have that in reverse.
Was reminded by the statement above to jet streams heading to the poles.
I don’t believe that the core “generates” the earth’s magnetic field. Think they have it all wrong. I believe that the massive ion currents that result from the jetstreams that sit atop the troposphere are largely responsible for “generating” the magnetic field (along with some extra help from a rotating ionosphere) and that this induces a field in the iron core which acts as a “stabiliser” (effectively a reactive “low pass” filter, like a kind of magnetic “inertia”) for the field. This would account for the high variability and rapid fluctuations of earth’s magnetic field as well as its tendency to be oriented to the earth’s axis whilst allowing for the magnetic poles to “wander” around 100’s of km every year. Recent discoveries of much more rapid field fluctuations than previously known lend strength to this theory, because a core of iron, whether solid or liquid iron, doing a dance like that would be shaking the earth quite violently, but I haven’t noticed such activity of late. Has anybody else???
[snip]
Reply: illuminati conspiracy theories not appropriate to this site ~ charles the moderator
Mike said: “So I should start wearing a tinfoil hat again?”
There is no tin foil anymore guys and girls, it’s called Aluminum foil. Unless Mike is over 60 I forgive him. Otherwise – buy a periodic table for Krize sakes.
Cran
HA HA HA!! At least we’re getting a light break here.
when was that 17 mile underground big bang inquisition by man fired up??? remember “curiousity killed the cat”
I remember one night long ago, I was about 18 or 19 years old at the time.
( either 1948 or 49)sitting on a headland overlooking the ocean near Sydney (Australia) 34 degrees latitude, and watching the Aurora Australis lights play the sky.
This phenomenon has never been seen since. Were there any unusual atmospheric occurences around that time to anyone’s knowledge ?
I hope someone answers Peggy.