#earthscore — Public Fediverse posts

@coreyspowell
10/
In short: It’s not an apocalypse; it’s a data corrective. It proves that the engine room of our planet is a highly active, rapidly changing environment, and it took a constellation of advanced satellites sixteen years of data-crunching to finally reveal what happened right under our feet.

#Geophysics
#Geomagnetism
#EarthsCore
#Geodynamics
#OuterCore
#Geodynamo
#ESASwarm
#CryoSat
#SatelliteData
#EarthObservation
#GeomagneticField
#WorldMagneticModel
#WMM

@coreyspowell
3/
The consequence: Discovering that a massive region of liquid iron the size of an ocean can abruptly change direction within a single decade means the core is far more turbulent, chaotic, and fast-moving than previously modeled. Scientists now have to completely rewrite their core-surface flow algorithms.

#Geophysics
#Geomagnetism
#EarthsCore
#OuterCore

@coreyspowell
2/
The practical and scientific consequences break down into a few key areas:

1. It Explodes a Long-Standing Geophysics Assumption

For centuries—ever since Edmond Halley noticed it in the 1600s—scientists tracked a steady, predictable "westward drift" of Earth's magnetic field features. Models of Earth's internal dynamo were largely built on the idea that this large-scale outer core circulation was stable and mostly uniform.

#Geophysics
#Geomagnetism
#EarthsCore
#OuterCore

@coreyspowell

On a day-to-day level for the average person, the immediate practical consequences are effectively zero. No alarms went off in 2010, the ground didn't shake, and your compass didn't suddenly flip backward.

However, within the realms of geophysics, satellite operation, and our understanding of how the planet functions, this discovery (published by the University of Edinburgh using ESA Swarm data) is a massive deal.

#Geophysics
#Geomagnetism
#EarthsCore
#OuterCore

The paper "The inherent instability of axisymmetric magnetostrophic dynamo models", written by Colin Hardy, Phil Livermore and myself, is now published online in the journal Geophysical & Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics.

Link (open access): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03091929.2022.2148666

Below I will give a (relatively) non-technical explanation of some background of our paper.

#geomagnetism #geodynamo #EarthsCore #magnetohydrodynamics #magnetostrophic