
India’s Telescope Detects Crack in the Earth’s Magnetic Shield - giis
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/31155/20161104/india-telescope-detects-crack-earth-magnetic-shield.htm
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1024core
God, what an awful site.

Here's the paper, in PRL:
[http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117...](http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.171101)

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astrodust
Advertising has been getting stupider and more insulting, almost aggressively
so.

I don't really want to use ad blockers, but I have to, this stuff is
nauseating.

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sp332
Is this something that would happen every time there's a solar storm, or did
something else temporarily weaken the earth's magnetic field around the same
time, making the effects of the storm worse?

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goodcanadian
This is something that could happen anytime there is a solar storm depending
on the details. The solar storm throws off huge amounts of electrically
charged particles. As these particles hit the Earth, they create electrical
currents in the atmosphere (after all, electrical currents are just charged
particles moving). Electric currents induce magnetic fields. If the flow is
large enough, the magnetic field can be locally much larger than the Earth's
thereby canceling the Earth's field out, changing its direction, or even
reversing it. This is why compasses can jump around during an auroral storm
(during the northern lights).

The "crack" in the magnetic field is nothing novel. That cosmic rays were
allowed in follows naturally. The (mildly) interesting thing is that it was
then detected by this muon tracking telescope.

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livatlantis
The article mentions that the study "...may hold clues for a better
understanding of future superstorms that could cripple modern technological
infrastructure on Earth,...".

What kind of crippling of modern tech infrastructure are we talking about?
Electrical interference? Radiation overdose that leads to... data loss? Could
someone more familiar with the topic enlighten me?

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noselasd
Stuff like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm)
or worse - e.g. EM waves knocking out satellites - having the GPS system
vanish would have quite severe impact.

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JustSomeNobody
> A crack has been detected in the Earth's magnetic shield, which allowed
> deadly cosmic ray particles to seep through into the atmosphere.

Deadly in general or deadly this time? If this time, how deadly?

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astrodust
They're way worse than UV rays since they're far higher energy, so if this is
as bad as the ozone hole it could be pretty bad.

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hollerith
ok, but their flux is vastly lower.

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progrocks9
Interesting. I use AdBlock on this page and the ads keep popping. Have they a
way to bypass AdBlock? (maybe with websockets I dunno). I can't really read
the article.

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zamalek
I got nothing with uBlock.

