We’re at the beginning of a ten-year-long cosmic dust storm and we don’t know what the consequences will be. The Sun’s magnetic poles have flipped, as they do periodically, so now some of the dust that floats around in our galaxy will be sucked into our solar system. The Sun used to act as a shield, protecting us from it. Cosmic dust bombardment in the past may have caused ice ages and mass extinctions. Stuart Clark writes in New Scientist that this data comes from DUST, an experiment on the ESA/NASA mission Ulysses, launched in 1990. ESA scientist Markus Landgraf found that three times more galactic dust is now entering the Solar System than during the 1990s. He doesn’t know how this will effect the Earth. He says, “Everything in interplanetary space eventually affects the planets, but exactly how is very speculative.”
One way to find out how the dust will affect us will be to analyze deep polar ice cores for the presence of cosmic dust and compare dust storms of the past with periods of mass extinction.
So many natural and man-made phenomena are converging to change our climate?are we prepared for the future?
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