NASA Explores Earth's Magnetic "Dent"

  • Released Monday, August 17, 2020
View full credits

Music: "Now We Wait" by Kamal David Kamruddin [PRS]

This video can be freely shared and downloaded. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, some individual imagery provided by pond5.com and Artbeats is obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. Specific details on stock footage may be found here. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html.

Complete transcript available.

Earth’s magnetic field acts like a protective shield around the planet, repelling and trapping charged particles from the Sun. But over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean, an unusually weak spot in the field – called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or SAA – allows these particles to dip closer to the surface than normal.

Currently, the SAA creates no visible impacts on daily life on the surface. However, recent observations and forecasts show that the region is expanding westward and continuing to weaken in intensity. It is also splitting – recent data shows the anomaly’s valley, or region of minimum field strength, has split into two lobes, creating additional challenges for satellite missions.

The South Atlantic Anomaly is also of interest to NASA’s Earth scientists who monitor the changes in magnetic strength there, both for how such changes affect Earth's atmosphere and as an indicator of what's happening to Earth's magnetic fields, deep inside the globe.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Monday, August 17, 2020.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:44 PM EDT.

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series: