Geology: "Earth's Magnetic Field and Climate Change"

“Earth’s Magnetic Field and Climate Change”

by Discovery

“The
Earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s
magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that is
unlikely to challenge the notion that human emissions are largely
responsible for global warming. “Our results show a strong correlation
between the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field and the amount of
precipitation in the tropics,” one of the two Danish geophysicists
behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at
Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and
his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and
Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic
field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and
stalactites found in China and Oman.

The
results of the study, which has also been published in scientific
journal “Geology,” lend support to a controversial theory published a
decade ago by Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who claimed the
climate was highly influenced by galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles
penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere. Svensmark’s theory, which pitted him
against today’s mainstream theorists who claim carbon dioxide (CO2) is
responsible for global warming, involved a link between the earth’s
magnetic field and climate, since that field helps regulate the number
of GCR particles that reach the earth’s atmosphere. “The only way we can
explain the (geomagnetic-climate) connection is through the exact same
physical mechanisms that were present in Henrik Svensmark’s theory,”
Knudsen said.

- http://dsc.discovery.com/