WHS BC Library Remote Learning: Talk about climate change...

What happened when the earth's magnetic poles flipped 42,000 years ago?

The earth's magnetic fields

The earth's magnetic poles are normally at the north and south poles. That's why magnets always point north when you use them in a compass or hang a magnet from a piece of string. The earth itself is a giant magnet that creates a magnetic field surrounding the planet. This magnetic field keeps out many of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays that can harm living things including humans.

The earth's magnetic fields block the sun's radiation

Once every 200,000 years or so the earth's magnetic poles shift. this creates widespread havoc with the weather and can severely impact on living things, with giant thunder storms that make the sky seem like a nuclear war. Well about 42,000 years ago this is exactly what happened. Scientist's have long suspected that this occurred and now are linking this climate disaster with mass extinction. At one point when the magnetic poles changed all those thousands of years ago, the magnetic field blocking the sun's rays decreased to only 6% of normal, which allowed a vastly increased amount of harmful ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface. This may have been the factor that led to the extinction of megafauna, large animals such as giant kangaroos, mammoths and a kind of giant wombat called a diprotodon. In addition, this is when our relatives, neanderthals also died out as a separate branch of humans. Hopefully this will not happen again for a long, long time. By then perhaps humans will be living on distant planets such as mars, so we won't need to worry!