Red sky in morning, Shepherd's warning

Is there something more important going on that's causing the strong Northern and Southern light shows recently?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have seen social and traditional media covered in pictures of the red skies all around the world recently, caused by Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) from the Sun.

Normally, the Northern and Southern lights are only visible closer to the earth’s magnetic poles (Such as Norway), but over the last few days, light shows have been visible all over the USA in the Northern Hemisphere, and all of New Zealand in the South Hemisphere.

Almost all reporting on this issue has blamed the increased light shows on increased Solar Activity - and that’s definitely part of it, however I haven’t seen any reporting on the cause being earths weakening magnetic field.

For those who don’t know, Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 10% over the last 200 years, and the weakening has been rapidly accelerating in recent years.

Every 250,000 years, Earth experiences a magnetic pole reversal, and this can come with some pretty catastrophic side effects, which we don’t fully understand.

One side effect would be the removal of Earth’s magnetic field as a shield from all the highly charged particles flying into us from outer space. This might drastically increase solar radiation, and give us all the equivalent of a few thousand chest X-rays.

When a pole reversal happens, data seems to indicate that it can occur very rapidly - perhaps just over a few days, and this might be accompanied by earthquakes, tsunamis, solar storms etc.

Hopefully the increasing red skies is not related to this, however if we start seeing them all the time over the next few years a pole shift could be imminent.

Fingers crossed that this isn’t something we will have to worry about in our lifetimes

Picture from Auckland NZ, taken by a friend