Our planet is replete with strange places that have haunted many for decades, leaving a huge number of questions that have not been answered.
The most famous of these places is the Bermuda Triangle. Since the beginning of the documentation of the accidents, more than 200 ships and aircraft have mysteriously disappeared here, which has led to a lot of myths and hypotheses about the nature of this mysterious place. But the most likely causes of accidents are powerful colliding air currents that form hurricanes, treacherous underwater currents and, oddly enough, abnormal changes in the magnetic field in this area.
But recent scientific research has given a new impetus to the study of the anomalous nature of such places - in the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have discovered an equally strange anomaly, which can be called the southern twin of the Bermuda Triangle.
We studied this history and tried to figure out what triggered research, what is happening in this part of the planet and what is the mystery of the occurrence of such anomalies.
Mysterious disappearance
This mysterious air incident occurred in 2009 with an Air France 447 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Having taken off from the Brazilian capital, the plane disappeared 4 hours later over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Search parties have been combing the sea surface for many months in search of answers to the reasons for the sudden disappearance. After a long time, the search was crowned with success and a group of experts began to investigate the mysterious incident. One of the versions surprised many - equipment failure due to intense exposure of electronics to radiation.
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Accidental discovery
In 2011, the Koro space telescope, while in Earth orbit at an altitude of 1000 km, measured the level of the flux of protons of solar origin. With these measurements, Koro has pinpointed an area where protons travel farther than anywhere else on Earth. This area was exactly where the search for the Air France 447 took place shortly before. Further long-term observations confirmed that the magnetic field here is different from that recorded in other parts of our planet. This is how the official name appeared - the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly.
Anomaly location
The South Atlantic or Brazilian anomaly has an area of about 8 million kilometers, covers most of South America and does not stop growing. Measurements carried out with the help of a satellite showed that it is in this place that the inner radiation belt of the Earth - the Van Allen belt - is located at a minimum distance from the surface of the planet. And perhaps this very factor is the reason for the strange events taking place here.
Satellites and anomaly
Just as the Bermuda Triangle is dangerous for ships and aircraft, so the Brazilian anomaly is a known threat to space satellites. Low-orbit communication satellites, flying over this zone, are bombarded with protons from the sun, destroying electronic chips or causing systems to shut down. Even the world famous Hubble telescope is forced to turn off some of its instruments to protect them.
Radiation on the approaches to the Earth
Subsequently, it turned out that the area of the radiation anomaly was “breathing”. The frequency of respiration (i.e., the change in particle fluxes) corresponds to the cycles of solar activity: at the maximum of activity, the fluxes decrease, and at the minimum, on the contrary, they increase. It would seem a paradox, but in the years of maximum, in a heated atmosphere, the density of its particles increases and radiation particles, colliding with atoms of the atmosphere, lose their energy. In the years of minimum, radiation fluxes, practically without encountering resistance, freely penetrate long distances into the atmosphere.
Magnetic field and magnetic poles
The cause of the South Atlantic anomaly is not known for certain, but it seems that it is associated with other, much more dangerous phenomena - a drop in the strength of the Earth's general magnetic field (which has been happening for 150 years) and a change in the orientation of the planet's magnetic poles.
Magnetic field inversion
Yes, the magnetic poles can be swapped, and this event has happened more than once. The last one is about 780 thousand years ago. Both the growing South Atlantic anomaly and the weakened magnetic field may be harbingers of a new polarity reversal. The inversion of the Earth's magnetic field is dangerous for our civilization because during this process the magnetic field will completely disappear, which means that magnetic storms ionize the atmosphere (goodbye, mobile phones) and burn space satellites. However, having disappeared, the magnetic field will gradually recover, but no one can say exactly when these events will occur.