The Earth Magnetic Field: Biblical artifacts provide reassurance about Earth's magnetic field- by Bradley J. Fikes

More than 2,700 years ago, the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded the biblical kingdom of Judah, spreading destruction nearly to Jerusalem before withdrawing.

The Assyrians boasted they had shut in Judah’s King Hezekiah “like a bird in a cage”. The Bible says an angel slew Sennacherib’s troops.

Modern historians say Hezekiah’s crafty diversion of Jerusalem’s water supply also played a role.
Neither king — nor anyone else alive then — could have known the Earth’s protective  magnetic field was rapidly weakening. The field diminished by 27 percent in three decades.

The event, unprecedented in 100,000 years, may shed light on the current state of the Earth’s diminishing field, which protects us (and satellites) from dangerous cosmic radiation. It may even provide clues to geophysicists about how the magnetic field is generated in the first place.

Read more: Biblical artifacts provide reassurance about Earth's magnetic field - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Space Exploration: NASA reveals clues to Mars’ watery past

“What happened to the Mars atmosphere? I’ll quote Bob Dylan – ‘The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind’,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist at the Mars Exploration Program, said in Washington DC on Thursday.

The findings suggest a solar storm blasted away Mars’ atmosphere around three and a half billion years ago. Unlike Earth, Mars did not have a global magnetic field to protect its atmosphere.
NASA’s Mars-orbiting MAVEN spacecraft caught such a storm stripping away the planet’s atmosphere, scientists said.

“Up until about 3.7 billion years ago, water seemed to be very abundant and active. So the stripping of the solar wind, the stripping by the solar wind, of the atmosphere, would have occurred in that same time-frame,” said MAVEN lead researcher Bruce Jakosky.

“Mars appears to meet all of the conditions required for life or to have met them at the surface in the past. And that begs the question of whether was ever any life there, and if there was, whether it was genetically related to terrestrial life or would represent an independent origin.

“So as we go into the future, I think these questions about life and climate and the history of the planet as a whole are really at the centre of the exploration,” Jakosky continued.

Read more: NASA reveals clues to Mars’ watery past | euronews, world news