Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
Earth's magnetic field may have been similarly as strong 3.7 billion years ago as it is today, pushing the earliest date for this planetary protective bubble back 200 million years.
However, the flow of solar charged particles was much stronger at that time, said Claire Nichols, an Earth scientist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, which was published April 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research. That strong"solar wind" would have stripped away the magnetosphere protecting the planet, meaning Earth was far less shielded than it is today. That finding has implications for the search for alien life.
Nichols and her team went far out of the way to seek out signs of the ancient magnetic field — 93 miles inland of Nuuk, Greenland, to a spot on the edge of the ice sheet accessible only by helicopter. Researchers can also look at folds in the rock caused by later geological upheaval to see if the direction of the magnetic field matches the orientation of the rock. If it doesn't, the magnetic field predates those geological events, for which researchers often know the ages. —Strange radio signals detected from Earth-like planet could be a magnetic field necessary for lifeUsing these methods, the researchers found that 3.
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