The Importance Of Earth's Magnetic Field

Earth's magnetic field, is moreover known as the geomagnetic field, this magnetic field that extends from the Earth's interior out into space, where it meets the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. Its magnitude at the Earth's surface ranges from 25 to 65 microteslas. Roughly speaking it is the field of a magnetic dipole currently tilted at an angle of about 11 degrees with respect to Earth's rotational axis, as if there were a bar magnet placed at that angle at the center of the Earth. The North geomagnetic pole, located near Greenland in the northern hemisphere, is actually the south pole of the Earth's magnetic field, and the South geomagnetic pole is the north pole. The magnetic field is generated by electric

However, at uneven intervals averaging several hundred thousand years, the Earth's field reverses and the North and South Magnetic Poles relatively suddenly switch places. These reversals of the geomagnetic poles leave a record in rocks that are of value to paleomagnetists in calculating geomagnetic fields in the past. Such information in return is helpful in studying the motions of continents and ocean floors in the movement of plate tectonics. The study of past magnetic field of the Earth is known as paleomagnetism. The polarity of the Earth's magnetic field is recorded in igneous rocks, and reversals of the field are thus detectable as "stripes" centered on mid-ocean ridges where the sea floor is spreading, while the stability of the geomagnetic poles between reversals has allowed paleomagnetists to track the past motion of continents. Reversals also provide the basis for magnetostratigraphic, a way of dating rocks and sediments. The field also magnetizes the crust, and magnetic anomalies can be used to search for deposits of metal

It stretches out several tens of thousands of kilometers into space, protecting the Earth from the charged particles of the solar wind and cosmic rays that would otherwise strip away the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The Earth's magnetic field serves to deflect most of the solar wind, whose charged particles would otherwise strip away the ozone layer that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. One stripping mechanism is for gas to be caught in bubbles of magnetic field, which are ripped off by solar winds. Ronald Merrill the author of Our Magnetic earth in a brief sentence says, “Just as winds in our atmosphere can erode and alter Earth’s landscape, the solar wind can erode planetary atmosphere. The solar wind exerts a pressure, and if it could reach Earth's atmosphere it would erode it. However, it is kept away by the pressure of the Earth's magnetic field” (Merrill, 2012). One example of this loss is mars where it lost its carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of, resulting from scavenging of ions by the solar wind, indicate that the dissipation of the magnetic field of Mars caused a near total loss of its atmosphere. As well as deflecting the solar wind, the Earth's magnetic field deflects cosmic rays, high-energy charged particles that are mostly from outside the