This soundtrack will make your skin crawl.
Flip Flop
Tens of thousands of years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field flipped — and now, scientists have recreated the haunting sound it made during that cataclysmic event.
Using data from the European Space Agency’s three-satellite Swarm mission delving deep into our planet’s magnetic field, Danish and German researchers have managed to map and recreate the sounds of what is known as the Laschamp event, which resulted in Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipping 41,000 years ago.
During this event, which was named after the Laschamps lava flows in France where evidence of this flip was first discovered in the 1960s, our planet’s magnetic field weakened to just five percent of its normal strength.
This allowed a bunch of cosmic rays to get past the atmosphere — and as researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Center for Geosciences show in their recreation, it made a terrible sound as well.
After essentially composing the notes of that ancient event, the Scandinavian researchers then used field recordings of everything from wood creaking and rocks falling and melded them together to create the freakish alien sounds of the planet’s magnetic field going berserk.
You can listen for yourself to the otherworldly intonation that is somehow terrestrial in nature.
Sound Swarm
Though this is our first listen at the long-ago Laschamp event, this is not the first time data from ESA’s Swarm mission has been used to soundtrack our planet’s magnetic field.
Back in October 2022, the space agency and the Tech University of Denmark released audio of what our modern magnetic field sounds like — and it, too, was quite chilling.
Like with the newer recording, the researchers appear to have used the recordings of wood creaking to represent the “sound” our planet’s magnetic field may make during solar storms.
“The rumbling of Earth’s magnetic field is accompanied by a representation of a geomagnetic storm that resulted from a solar flare on 3 November 2011,” explained TUD musician project supporter Klaus Nielsen in a 2022 statement about the recording, “and indeed it sounds pretty scary.”
For the 2022 recording, the scientists gained access to 32 underground speakers in Copenhagen’s Solbjerg Square to play the magnetic field representation for the public just in time for Halloween of that year.
With this latest release, the Danish researchers have once again brought the sounds of our planet’s magnetic field out in time for spooky season — and did so, coincidentally, right after yet another powerful solar storm hit the Western Hemisphere.
More on magnetic fields: Paper Claims Dying SpaceX Satellites Could Weaken Earth’s Magnetic Field
