The simulation explained the flipping of the magnetic poles of the Earth.
Geologists have proposed a new explanation for why the magnetic poles of the Earth occasionally change their direction.
According to scientists, this happens due to the impact of Dynamo-waves inside the core of our planet. The researchers ‘ findings were published in the journal Nature.
Researchers have long known that North and South magnetic poles of the Earth switch places sometimes. A phenomenon in which the planet’s magnetic field changes direction, is called inversion. With the inversion of the magnetic North pole and magnetic South pole switch places, while the geographical poles maintain their position. This event is quite rare: according to studies, long last inversion of the magnetic field occurred around 781 thousand years ago.
Despite the fact that researchers known mechanics of the MHD Dynamo until now, scientists could not create a model that could explain the inversion of Earth’s magnetic field and thus to reproduce all the known properties of its nucleus, including viscosity and conductivity. However, the authors of the new work solved this problem by assuming that the magnetic field can occur Dynamo-wave. They are born due to the fact that our planet rotates around its axis, and create a powerful global perturbations of the magnetic field.
A computer simulation that took into account the existence of Dynamo waves, showed that the position of the poles of the Earth will change even when the viscosity and other properties of the nucleus will be close to the real values. However, the model of researchers predicts that this should happen every few thousand years, while in reality there is no periodicity in the change of poles was found. The authors emphasize that the characteristics of the Earth’s core, described in the simulations still differ from the observed, so the model only indicates that the Dynamo waves can play an important role in the inversion of the magnetic field of our planet.
