Why Magnetic Field Decay Matters

Earth’s magnetic field is vital for life, but it is decaying. To keep it going billions of years, evolutionists gloss over facts.

On Live Science, Stephanie Pappas asks, “What if Earth’s magnetic field disappeared?” Our planetary shield is “important for life,” she admits, and it is decaying in strength, she confesses. But she downplays its protective function. One reason is that evolutionists need their billions of years for the Stuff Happens Law to have time to mold humans out of bacteria. But they can’t have their precious billions of years, because the magnetic field is measurably decaying by 5% per century. It could not have lasted billions of years, and will be long gone before a billion more years could transpire.

Thank God for our magnetic field

Here are some of the blessings we get from having a robust magnetic field, taken from her article.

• It shields the planet from solar particles.
• It provides a basis for navigation.
• It helps prevent solar erosion of our atmosphere.
• It protects the ozone layer, which shields life from UV rays.
• It protects our power grids and satellites.
• It generates the aurora, one of the most awesome sights in the sky (see Illustra film).
• And, she continues, “It might have played an important role in the evolution of life on Earth…”

Conversely, if the field were lost, these benefits would go away.

But what would happen if Earth’s magnetic field disappeared tomorrow? A larger number of charged solar particles would bombard the planet, putting power grids and satellites on the fritz and increasing human exposure to higher levels of cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. In other words, a missing magnetic field would have consequences that would be problematic but not necessarily apocalyptic, at least in the short term.

A running theme in the article is that loss of our field not be catastrophic right away. And yet increase in skin cancer for humans is only part of the problem. Many more delicate creatures in the oceans and on land would suffer from the barrage of radiation. It’s possible entire ecosystems would collapse, putting the food web into stress. Over “billions of years,” maybe the only survivors would be cave dwellers. Pappas and her physicist experts do not get into that. Maybe they think mutations are good things, providing a seed bed for natural selection to work on. Realistic science shows radiation harming organisms, not helping them.

Another fact glossed over in the article is the protection we get from (1) coronal mass ejections, (2) solar flares, and (3) cosmic rays. These episodic attacks on Earth can do far more damage in a shorter time than the steady rate of solar radiation.

Can’t Breathe Without a Magnetic Field

Loss of a magnetic field is linked to loss of an atmosphere. Just look at the other planets:

There is little evidence that past magnetic field variations have impacted life on Earth. Still, the magnetic field has undoubtedly shaped Earth’s surface, helping to keep the planet’s fragile atmosphere from being blown into space by the relentless force of the solar wind, Archer told Live Science.

A magnetic field is not crucial for having an atmosphere — Venus has no magnetic field and has a massive, if unwelcoming, atmosphere — but it certainly acts as an additional protective layer. Mars, which used to have a magnetic field but lost it some 4 billion years ago, has had its atmosphere almost entirely stripped away. And if there were a way to give the moon an Earth-like atmosphere, the solar wind would whittle it to nothing in a mere century, Archer said.

“We’re Talking Billions of Years”

A main reason Pappas downplays a weakening field is that she and her experts are confident that the field is billions of years old. This is expressed in a series of unsupported assertions rather than observational facts:

• The first thing to understand about the magnetic field is that, even if it weakens, it’s not going to disappear — at least, not for billions of years.
• This magnetic-field engine, known as a dynamo, has been chugging along for billions of years.
• Scientists think that the current core arrangement may have settled into place about 1.5 billion years ago.
• Tarduno and his team have found evidence for a magnetic field on Earth in the planet’s oldest minerals, zircons, dating back 4.2 billion years, suggesting that activity in the core has been creating magnetism for a very long time.
• “We’re talking billions of years,” Tarduno said.

Got that? We’re talking billions of years. Billions of years. Billions of years. You are getting sleepy. You are getting verrrrryyyy sleeeeeepy….

The only raw data invoked to support these old ages involves geomagnetic reversals and radiometric dating, but radiometric dating methods rest on circular reasoning about the age of the Earth, and cherry-picking dating methods that give long ages, ignoring over a hundred other facts that do not permit millions and billions of years (CMI). Geomagnetic reversals, while interesting and informative, do not involve the decay rate. The rest of Live Science’s support for long ages comes from models of a geodynamo, but that is theoretical, and not without serious problems.

Geodynamo No Solution

In Spacecraft Earth, Dr Henry Richter explains why geodynamo theory is no solution. In chapter 7, he says,

Surely secular geophysicists are aware of this problem. Some ignore it, thinking other evidence proves the earth to be much older. Some try to attack the credibility of Barnes and Humphreys [creation scientists who elaborated on the decay of Earth’s magnetic field]. Most simply assume that someone else has figured out a solution that will keep the magnetic field going for billions of years. The favored explanation is that a permanent dynamo runs in the earth’s interior… Somehow, this dynamo is sustained by convection, orbital mechanics, or residual heat from the core. (One critic of Barnes’ theory says that “This dynamo is driven by an unknown energy source.”) They’ve been working on this problem for over half a century with limited success. As we said, though, one cannot get something from nothing. Energy dissipates over time; the magnetic field energy is radiated to space, where it is no longer available to power the field. It should be decaying, and measurements show it is decaying. Even if reversals occurred during earth’s existence, the overall strength could not have climbed higher than what it was before. It would have decayed at those times, and continues to decay now. (Spacecraft Earth, pp. 133-134)

Facing the Facts: Field Decay

Pappas admits openly that the Earth’s magnetic field is decaying, but she rests on the repetitive “billions of years” to save it from falsifying Darwinism. Some quotes from the Live Science article:

• For more than a century, it’s been weakening.
• The first thing to understand about the magnetic field is that, even if it weakens, it’s not going to disappear — at least, not for billions of years.
• Far more relevant to the lives of humans is that the magnetic field is weakening.
• Scientists have been measuring this weakening directly with magnetic observatories and satellites for the past 160 years.
• The good news is that, even if the field is weakening, or preparing to flip, it’s not going to disappear; there’s no evidence that the magnetic field has ever gone away completely during a reversal. [A sidestep around the problem. Reversals are different from decay.]

Once again, reversals, anomalies, and axis motions are not the problem. The overall energy of the magnetic field is decaying. In one of the longest data collections in the history of science (Karl Gauss began measuring the field in 1835), scientists have measured a steady decay of the field strength amounting to about 5% per century. This fits an exponential curve. Extrapolated into the past, the field would have been dangerously strong just 10,000 years ago, and would have rendered the Earth uninhabitable 20,000 years ago. Projecting into the future, the biosphere only has thousands of years—not billions—before the Earth could become stressed or unlivable due to radiation. Combined with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the evidence points to a young Earth with not much more time to go.

Earth’s magnetic field is an example of Foresight that was necessary for our planet to be a suitable habitation for life. Evolutionists ignore the decay evidence at their peril. It spells doomsday far more credibly than global warming. It dooms Darwinian evolution, not giving them the precious billions of years they want to maintain a chance universe without God. It reinforces the Bible’s account of a recent creation and a new creation after Christ returns. What we see in Live Science’s article is a series of sidesteps, selective arguments and bluffing assertions organized to maintain the moyboys‘ religion instead of following the scientific evidence where it leads.

The field also showcases God’s glory in creation. As an example, see how God’s provision for our protection with the magnetic field has a wondrous side effect: the aurora borealis. Illustra Media’s beautiful short film Heavenly Fire, embedded below, explores the connection between function and beauty in the aurora phenomenon. It was produced for their DVD Call of the Cosmos, available from Go2RPI.com, and is also posted on their site, TheJohn1010Project.com.