Earth’s protective shield weakening

We all live on a very special planet it is perhaps one in a million. Our Earth is blessed with so many factors that allow, and help life survive.Our sun is a powerful, harsh heat generator with no respect for life on earth. It is violent, tumultuous and very powerful. And it is supported in this way by the surrounding Cosmos, our whole solar system environment. This Cosmos too, is unpredictable and violent, sending at us various harmful particles, too.

Notably, we have two great protections against our angry sun. The earth has an iron core and this core is magnetized, like a N-South bar magnet. This gives us a protective magnetic structure around the earth. It is this magnetism gives us a protective shield against all those harmful particles: all those Gamma rays and that ultraviolet light.

The second great protection from the sun is our thick atmosphere stretching many hundreds of miles into the sky. This thick blanket of gases: our atmosphere consisting of nitrogen, oxygen, etc., also protects us from these harmful rays and particles. These two protections have made conditions here in earth suitable for life and allows life to grow and thrive successfully.These are two protections that give us comfort, but sadly, there are two other factors which threaten our existence on this planet.

Firstly, our magnetic shield is weakening, slowly, in strength. Our shield has weakened by about 25% in 70 years, and will weaken further to a final end, and at this point it will flip and its strength will slowly return to normal but with the polarity reversed. That is the current thinking.

Along with this bad news comes the news that our Sun also has cycles of increases and decreases in power over an eleven-year period; it goes from dullness and inactivity to extreme activity, called sunspot maximum. This is where the sun ejects flares and sometimes great waves of material called Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). This is where it is really dangerous for us on planet earth…

Coronal Mass Ejections consist of millions of tons of red-hot particles travelling out from the sun traversing the universe. These can and do arrive at planet earth. Luckily earth is very far away from the sun and also is quite a small target. Also, the CME has to be discharged at the exact horizontal, circular position and also at the right elevation – so, luckily, the chance of doing that is small. But the chance is there.

Scientists have calculated the probability, based on past events and they occur every 150 or 200 years. The last serious hit was the Carrington effect, which happened about 150 years ago. Also, the severity of a hit is increasing due to our weakening magnetic shield. This makes a CME hit on earth more probable with more devastation if the numbers are correct.

CMEs can be large or small. All CMEs carry charge – that means they carry electricity, too. Small CMEs in the past have been very destructive to our power grids, including transformers. A big CME could burn out our entire grid putting our lives at risk due to lack of electricity for services; no ability to pump diesel or petrol, no ATMs and no clean drinking water. We would be plunged back into the dark ages of not so long ago.I suggest that preparations be made to prepare for this event by having duplicate machinery in storage. We are a sitting target waiting to be blind-sided with a sucker punch. How foolish is that?

Priyantha Hettige