Ahoy, Earth Changes Ahead

The consequences of a powerful explosion close to earth on 20 December 2015 are only clear to researches now, four years down the line.

It has taken them this long to wrap their minds around what happened with their results published just this week, in the January 13 2020 edition of Natural Physics.

According to Dr Tony Phillips at Space Weather, explosions in the earth’s magnetic field happen all the time when gusts of solar winds press against earth’s magnetosphere squeezing lines of magnetic force together.

The lines cross and reconnect, literally exploding, propelling high-energy particles toward earth and auroras are the afterglow of this process.

Although these explosions usually happen at least 100 000 miles from earth, downstream in our planet’s magnetic tail says lead author, Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA.

However, on December 20 2015 a reconnection event only 30 000 miles away was observed, making it more than three times closer than normal.

It happened NASA’s swarm of three THEMIS spacecraft was passing through the area, and were able to pinpoint the explosion’s location “right on the doorstep” of the geosynchronous satellite belt.

This showed reconnection events pose a previously overlooked threat to Earth-orbiting satellites.

The nearby blast caused a strong G2-class geomagnetic storm and intense auroras around the Arctic Circle.

To get an idea of the magnitude of energy involved in such events consider the following:

The explosion and subsequent storm delivered as much as ~88 Petajoules of energy to the near-Earth environment.

That’s more than 10 times the energy of the largest US nuclear bomb and about 20 times the energy of a magnitude 7 earth quake.”

Before the December 20 event many researchers felt that reconnection at such close proximity was impossible because the earth’s nearby magnetic field was too stable …so they thought.

This new information is going to have a big impact on future studies of geomagnetic storms according to researchers.

Occurrences like the one we learned about in Norway on January 6 2020 was possibly due to one of these ‘earth magnetosphere reconnections’ now occurring at distances much closer to earth than initially realized, and it’s not unlikely the gap will be bridged even further.

Extreme weather conditions and events will also attest to the weakening of the earth’s magnetosphere.