NASA scientists have been tracking a strange “dent” in the Earth’s magnetic field as it slowly moves westwards over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean.
The Earth’s magnetic field is what protects us from highly charged particles arriving to our planet from the Sun, known as solar winds.
But scientists have noticed that this effect weakens significantly in a specific area above the South Atlantic. While this are, which has been known for a while now as the “South Atlantic Anomaly” (SAA), researchers are now observing that the region is moving westwards — an even splitting into two lobes, according to a NASA statement.
Experts believe the dent is caused by vicious solar storms deforming the “Van Allen Belts,” two donut-shaped zones wrapping Earth that capture charged particles.
“A localized field with reversed polarity grows strongly in the SAA region, thus making the field intensity very weak, weaker than that of the surrounding regions,” Weijia Kuang, a geophysicist and mathematician in Goddard’s Geodesy and Geophysics Laboratory, explained in the statement.
A spatial weakening in the planet’s magnetic field could leave satellites passing over the SAA exposed to charged particles and relatively high levels of radiation. In the worst case, charged particles could short circuit and take out entire satellites.
That’s why a team of NASA scientists are keeping close tabs on the moving “pothole in space,” as the agency refers to it by creating long-term space weather forecasts.
