Latest study shows how fast Earth's- magnetic field is changing Video

Latest research has shown in the most feature yet how rapidly Earth's magnetic field - which acts like a shield to protect us from harsh solar winds and cosmic energy - is changing, getting weaker over some part of the world, and strengthening over others.
Although imperceptible, these changes can have big impacts - the fluctuation is by now shifting the location of the magnetic North Pole, and could decide how space events such as solar storms influence us in the future. But thanks to the latest study, scientists now think they know what's cause them, and how to predict them leaving forward.
This isn't the first research to explain that Earth's magnetic field is changing. Our magnetic field has forever been in flux, and over the past few years it's become apparent that the invisible bubble that protects our planet from the harsh conditions of outer space has been receiving weaker and weaker.
According to scientists' top estimates, the field is now weakening around 10 times faster than initially thought, behind approximately 5 percent of its strength every decade. But they don't actually know why, or what that means for our planet.
One of the majority likely explanations for what we're seeing is that our magnetic poles are receiving ready to flip - something that happens once each 100,000 years or so, and that sounds a lot scarier than it really is. There's no evidence that life on Earth suffered when this happened in the past - the most likely impact is that our compasses would finally point south instead of north.
"Such a flip is not instantaneous, but would get many hundred if not a few thousand years," Rune Floberghagen from the European Space Agency (ESA) told LiveScience back in 2014. "They have happened a lot of times in the past."
But in spite of the overall message being 'don't panic', scientists still know relatively little about our magnetic field, so in 2013, ESA launch a trio of satellites called Swarm, which measure Earth's magnetic field from signals pending from Earth's core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere, and magnetosphere.
Using that data and those from additional satellites, they've just released the clearest map so far of precisely how our magnetic field is changing - where it's weakening and strengthening - and what's cause those shifts. Importantly, it reveals just how fast these changes are captivating place.
"Unexpectedly, we are result rapid localised field changes that seem to be a result of accelerations of liquid metal flowing within the core."
The study hasn't been peer reviewed as yet, so for currently we're taking the ESA's word for it, but if confirmed, this means we lastly have some solid evidence as to what's controlling the shifts we're seeing - and that could help us predict what's going to happen next. For example, how worried we require to be about the next large solar storm.
Latest  study shows how fast Earth's- magnetic field is changing Video
The research could also help us lastly understand why our planet's magnetic field is weakening overall, and how that's going to influence us in future. Because a pole flip probably won't be a large deal, but it's nice to make sure - if our magnetic sphere is about to go the way of Mars's, that's amazing we require to know about.

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