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 it has seen the latest collapse of Magnetic field of the earth.
ScienceMag
The massive trunk which actually belongs to one of the largest tree species in the country is said to be about 42,000 years old and was preserved in a wet muddy soil – its rings span 1,700 years and show a chaotic timeline when the magnetic field of the world was turned upside down.
The radiocarbon levels in this massive piece of wood show a peak in the radiation from space Magnetic field of the earth that protected the weakened and the poles really went over, the researchers said.
They say that modeling the effect of this radiation on the Earth’s atmosphere drastically changed Earth’s climate for some time, which could have been responsible for the extinction of large mammals. from Australia and the Neanderthals in Europe.
What’s more surprising is that the study tells a detailed story regarding the timing and magnitude of this polar swap, while also being the first to make a credible case (though speculative) that the swapping could affect the global climate.
In case you didn’t know yet Magnetic field of the earth is formed due to the flow of molten iron in the outer core of the earth’s crust which is also prone to chaotic fluctuations which are known to not only weaken the field but also cause the posts to fully move and tip over.
The magnetic orientation of minerals in rock is known to leave traces of long-lasting reversals, but the same cannot be said for somersaults lasting only a few hundred years, such as those about 42,000 years ago. However, radiocarbon-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 the trees. The team took the help of radiocarbon to date the aforementioned cowrie wood using accurate but fairly crude radiocarbon cave records from China. After measuring finer carbon-14 changes in the tree rings, they tracked how its growth varied over 40-year intervals as the magnetic fields ebbed and fluctuated.
Radiocarbon spikes hinted that the magnetic field was weakening by 6 percent of its current strength about 41,500 years agoDuring that time, the posts turned and the field recovered some strength, but crashed and turned back about 500 years later.
NASA
Researchers also claim that at this point not only was our planet’s cosmic radiation shield non-functional, but that of our sun as well. Looking at hints of ice cores, researchers suggest that at the time the Sun was going through periods of low magnetic activities – called grand minima – that they believe would have destroyed current electricity grids and created aurorae in subtropics, due to ionization of the atmosphere. .
Running a climate model further suggested that such an attack on cosmic rays would have destroyed the ozone layer, reduced the heat it would otherwise receive from UV radiation, while also causing changes in the cooling at high altitude, the wind currents would change and cause catastrophic changes on the Earth’s surface, with a colder America and a warmer Europe.