Satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) in recent times has provided evidence of a mysterious anomaly weakening Earth’s magnetic field, which is continuing to grow. And the latest data indicate the anomaly may be splitting into two separate anomalies. What does this suggest for the decay of the Earth’s magnetic field strength?
NASA has been monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.
This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.
“The magnetic field is actually a superposition of fields from many current sources,” geophysicist Terry Sabaka from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland explained in 2020.
The primary source is considered to be a swirling ocean of molten iron inside Earth’s outer core, thousands of kilometers below the ground. The movement of that mass generates electrical currents that create Earth’s magnetic field, but not necessarily uniformly, it seems.
A huge reservoir of dense rock called the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, located about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the African continent, is thought to disturb the field’s generation, resulting in the dramatic weakening effect – which is aided by the tilt of the planet’s magnetic axis.
“The observed SAA can be also interpreted as a consequence of weakening dominance of the dipole field in the region,” said NASA Goddard geophysicist and mathematician Weijia Kuang in 2020.
ScienceAlert, December 29, 2024
The Earth’s magnetic field is an important design issue for life on the planet. A strong magnetic field creates a force field around Earth for the high energy particles coming mostly from the sun but also from interstellar space, called cosmic rays. If that protective shield should weaken more charged particles can get into our environment and particularly affect telecommunications.
However a biblical creationist worldview would expect to see effects of the great deluge, when the Earth’s magnetic axis and its spin axis were misaligned from each other. The year of the flood was chaotic with catastrophic plate tectonics shifting a lot of rock into the mantle. And therefore rapid changes in the liquid outer core of the planet resulting turbulent electric currents would be expected.
Those turbulent effects shift energy from the primary North-South magnetic dipole into higher order non-dipole parts of the magnetic field. The weakening of the magnetic field strength in this region called South Atlantic Anomaly is a result of this, combined with the total energy in the Earth’s magnetic field exponentially decaying.
Total energy from the Earth’s magnetic field has decreased over the last 190 years since it has been measured.
It is in exponential decay and if continued would lead to a loss of all shielding effects. It also means, if projected backwards in time, that the Earth cannot be older than about 10,000 years, because, if it were, the magnetic field strength would have been so high it would have destroyed the planet. That is, the planet could not have had its origin in such a high magnetic field.
Therefore secular geophysicists argue that the outer core of the planet has an in-built magnetic-field dynamo. The internal currents are such that they constantly re-energise the magnetic field and therefore it could have been cycling up and down in field strength for billions of years.
The old-earth geophysicists agree that the Earth’s magnetic dipole field strength is decaying but promote the idea that the energy loss is being gained by the non-dipole field, that is, it is shifting into the quadrupole and octupole components.
Dr. Russell Humphreys wrote the following in his 2002 CRSQ research paper on this subject.
This paper closes a loophole in the case for a young earth based on the loss of energy from various parts of the earth’s magnetic field. Using ambiguous 1967 data, evolutionists [geophysicists] had claimed that energy gains in minor (“non-dipole”) parts compensate for the energy loss from the main (“dipole”) part. However, nobody seems to have checked that claim with newer, more accurate data. Using data from the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) I show that from 1970 to 2000, the dipole part of the field steadily lost 235 ± 5 billion megajoules of energy, while the non-dipole part gained only 129 ± 8 billion megajoules. Over that 30-year period, the net loss of energy from all observable parts of the field was 1.41 ± 0.16 %. At that rate, the field would lose half its energy every 1465 ± 166 years. Combined with my 1990 theory explaining reversals of polarity during the Genesis Flood and intensity fluctuations after that, these new data support the creationist model: the field has rapidly and continuously lost energy ever since God created it about 6,000 years ago.
The total energy of the magnetic field, when all components are included, is exponentially being lost.
I asked Dr. Humphreys for a comment on this to which he responded.
I’ve only done the energy calculation, accounting for the non-dipole components (which are important), from the year 1900 onward. We can say with certainty that the dipole component energy has been decreasing steadily since the 1830’s. Very probably the total energy (in all components) has also been decreasing since that time.
The present decrease in South Atlantic Anomaly is probably due to the decay and perturbation of small loops of current left over from the large disturbances in the flood year, when the field was reversing itself rapidly.
This is evidence of Earth and the universe being created less than 10,000 years ago. It is also a design principle.
Without the Sustaining Power of the Creator, which is something like a Fifth Force in the universe, given sufficient time, our planet will eventually lose its magnetic field. Thus without the Creator’s intervention life would eventually cease to exist. Without its protective effect life could not exist. Such is the importance of the magnetic field.
The mysterious weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field is not so mysterious when viewed through a biblical creation history and catastrophic Earth changes that occurred during Noah’s time.
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