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Space
Space
Science
Brett Tingley

A giant weak spot in Earth's magnetic field is getting bigger — and it could be bad news for satellites

A map of earth overlaid in splotches of orange and purple.

A weak region in Earth's magnetic field has grown by an area roughly half the size of continental Europe in the last 10 years.

That's according to data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm satellite constellation over the last 11 years. Swarm has been monitoring a region known as the South Atlantic Anomaly since 2014, and scientists have just published a new study of the area that reveals that, not only has the anomaly expanded eastward, it has actually been weakening more quickly since 2020.

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