The real final frontier?
New research could revolutionize our understanding of our oceans and change the way we look at them forever, says John Hillman
New scientific research has been published with suggests that our planet’s magnetic field is being produced by ocean currents rather than molten metal swirling around at the Earth’s core.
If this is correct it means that the movement of salt-water is the only thing protecting us from a nasty encounter with high levels of solar radiation that wants to burn up our atmosphere and destroy all life on our planet.
And magnetism is also what makes all our electronics work, so if correct does this mean that the sea is underpinning electronic communication? Weird.
Despite scepticism from many quarters of the scientific community, the report, published by Britain’s Institute of Physic’s New Journal of Physics (now that’s what I call a snappy title!) puts forward ideas that could revolutionize our understanding of geophysics and show that we have badly underestimated the effect caused by the continuous movement of large amounts of salt-water around the planet.
It would also present a possible explanation for the mysterious behaviour of the north and south poles which swap places every 800,000 years or so. Ocean currents change and adapt according to external factors, such as climate change and the movement of tectonic plates, so this could alter the strength of the magnetic field in different parts of the world from time to time.
The magnetic field has always been thought to have been generated by the Earth’s core, a thick ball of white-hot iron surrounded by liquid metal which, as they move together, generates the magnetic field that penetrates 1000s of miles out into space and keeps us all safe and healthy – it sounds completely logical.
However if correct the new research will blow this orthodox hypothesis out of the water and make everything we thought we knew about geophysics irrelevant. It could be wrong, but at the very least it demonstrates just how much there still to understand about the world around us and especially about that big blue wobbly thing that our genetic ancestors crawled out of all those millions of years ago.
image credit: per ola wiberg
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