A few years ago, workers digging to build a power plant in New Zealand discovered a 60-ton trunk of a kauri tree and now, according to researchers, it has caught the latest collapse of The Earth’s magnetic field.
ScienceMag
The massive trunk, which belongs to one of the largest tree species in the country, is said to be about 42,000 years old and has been kept in moist, muddy ground – its rings stretch for 1700 years, showing a chaotic chronology when the magnetic field of the world it was overturned upside down.
Radiocarbon levels in this massive piece of wood show an increase in radiation from space as The Earth’s magnetic field which protected him weakened and the poles overturned, according to researchers.
They say that by modeling the effect of this radiation on the Earth’s atmosphere, the Earth’s climate has changed drastically for some time, which could have been responsible for the extinction of large mammals. from Australia and Neanderthals from Europe.
What is more surprising is that the study tells a detailed story about the timing and extent of this exchange of poles, while being the first to make a credible (albeit speculative) case that the reversal could affect the global climate.
In case you didn’t know, The Earth’s magnetic field is formed due to the flow of molten iron in the outer core of the earth’s crust, which is also susceptible to chaotic oscillations which are known to not only weaken the field, but can also cause the poles to move and twist completely.
It is known that the magnetic orientation of rock minerals leaves traces of long-term reversals, but the same cannot be said for flips that last only a few hundred years, like the one about 42,000 years ago. However, radioactive carbon 14 can detect these short fluctuations. The isotope is created when cosmic rays from space pass through the magnetic field and hit the atmosphere.
This is also absorbed by living things on the planet, including trees. The team enlisted the help of radiocarbon to date the above-mentioned kauri wood, using accurate but rather crude radiocarbon cave recordings from China. After measuring the finer changes in carbon-14 in tree rings, they tracked the difference in its growth over 40-year intervals as the magnetic fields decreased and increased.
Radiocarbon spikes suggested that the magnetic field weakened by 6% of its current power about 41,500 years ago.. During that period, the pillars overturned, and the field regained its strength, but then collapsed and overturned about 500 years later.
GODMOTHER
Researchers also claim that, at this time, the cosmic shield of our planet was not functional, but also of our Sun. Looking at clues in the ice cores, researchers suggest that at that time the sun was experiencing episodes of weak magnetic activity – called grand minima – which, according to them, would have destroyed today’s power grids and created auroras in the subtropics due to ionization. atmosphere.
Running a climate model further suggested that such a cosmic ray attack would have destroyed the ozone layer, reducing the heat it otherwise captures from UV rays, while causing changes in high-altitude cooling, altering wind flows and causing catastrophic changes on the Earth’s surface, with a colder America and a warmer Europe.