For some time now, scientists have been a little concerned over an anomaly in the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s so concerning, they even gave it its own name—the South Atlantic anomaly, or SAA for short.
It’s a weird dent in our planet’s protective magnetic bubble, and it’s getting worse for reasons that remain a mystery. Stretching from South America to southern Africa, the SAA is like a bruise on Earth’s magnetic field. Its intensity is so weak that satellites get bombarded with cosmic radiation, astronauts pick up extra rads, and a GPS device might go bonkers.
Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Swarm mission, which involves a trio of satellites launched in 2013 to monitor the magnetic field, we now know the SAA has grown by half the size of Europe since 2014. Researchers published their findings in Physics Of The Earth and Planetary Interiors.
There’s a Weak Spot in Earth’s Magnetic Field—and It’s Growing
Getting bigger, and it’s getting weirder. Geophysicists have discovered the anomaly isn’t just a single dead zone; it has layers. One side of it, near Africa, is behaving differently from the side of it near South America.
The core problem with all of it doesn’t exist above us in the magnetic field, but somewhat below us. The Earth’s magnetic field is powered by an ocean of molten iron in the outer core. Its constant motion keeps things nice and stable, except when it doesn’t, because something seems to be throwing off the flow.
Swarm data shows areas where magnetic lines, instead of emerging from the Earth like they’re supposed to in the Southern Hemisphere, are diving back into the core. That’s…weird.
Some researchers believe the culprit might be a gigantic subterranean blob called the African Large Low-Shear-Velocity Province (LLSVP). It’s a mouthful, but basically, it’s a giant hot zone near the core that could be disrupting the whole convection process.
The anomaly isn’t a death sentence, but it serves as a reminder of how much of what dictates life on the surface of the earth and above our heads is determined by what goes on beneath our feet.
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