Creepy sound of Earth’s magnetic field flip: Listen here!
Listen to the creepy sound of our Earth’s magnetic field flip 41,000 years ago. Video via ESA. Animation and science: Maximilian Arthus Schanner and Guram Kervalishvili (GFZ); Sound: Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space).
- Earth’s magnetic field flipped some 41,000 years ago. This flip was the Laschamp event and it lasted only briefly, about a few hundred years.
- Researchers used data from ESA’s Swarm mission, which analyzes Earth’s magnetic field, to create a ‘sound visualization’ of the flip.
- The creepy sound of the magnetic field flip uses natural noises from Earth, like wood creaking and rocks falling.
ESA published this original article on October 10, 2024. Edits by EarthSky.
Creepy sound of Earth’s magnetic field flip
Approximately 41,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field briefly reversed during what is known as the Laschamp event. During this time, Earth’s magnetic field weakened significantly – dropping to a minimum of 5% of its current strength – which allowed more cosmic rays to reach Earth’s atmosphere.
With this in mind, scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Centre for Geosciences used data from ESA’s Swarm mission, along with other sources, to create a sound visualization of the Laschamp event. They mapped the movement of Earth’s magnetic field lines during the event and created a stereo sound version, which is what you can hear in the video.
The researchers made the soundscape using recordings of natural noises like wood creaking and rocks falling, blending them into familiar and strange, almost alien-like, sounds. Overall, the process of transforming the sounds with data is similar to composing music from a score.
In addition, scientists are using data from ESA’s Swarm constellation to better understand how Earth generates its magnetic field. The satellites measure magnetic signals not only from the core, but also from the mantle, crust, oceans and up to the ionosphere and magnetosphere. These data are crucial for studying phenomena such as geomagnetic reversals and Earth’s internal dynamics.
The sound of Earth’s magnetic field, the first version of the magnetic field sonification produced with Swarm data, was originally played through a 32-speaker system set up in a public square in Copenhagen, with each speaker representing changes in the magnetic field at different places around the world over the past 100,000 years.
Bottom line: Listen to the the creepy sound of Earth’s magnetic field flip from 41,000 years ago!
Read more: Are the Earth’s magnetic poles about to swap places?
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