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Gold/Mining/Energy : ECHARTERS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brian krause who wrote (3207)	8/29/1999 6:04:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3744

That explains why some people act like old gasbags.. high magnetism. Hmmmm... I never heard a convincing explanation of why earth has a magnetic field in the first place. Some think it might be a dynamo effect caused by circulation of high iron molten materials in rotation. Or it may be a giant permanent magnet. I thought that materials past their curie point lost their magnetism, so how the molten centre is magnetic I can't imagine. Perhaps its the earth's lower crust that is high in magnetite and it has been magnetized by rotating in a electrical solar wind over the centuries. I would have thought that gravity played a stronger role than electrical charge attraction. Magnetism is a very weak force and I cannot see it affecting charged molecules much. Perhaps civilizations past on these planets had too much freon refrigeration and they lost their ozone layer and after that the atmosphere just burned off. EC<:-}

To: brian krause who wrote (3207)	8/31/1999 6:13:00 PM
From: Lorne	Respond to of 3744

brian - As far as I know gravity is the reason for either the presence or lack of an atmosphere. The less massive the planet the less atmosphere it can hold.

To: brian krause who wrote (3207)	9/6/1999 12:08:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3744

Brian, The magnetic field produces a more or less spherical field that gathers and directs the solar wind ions into a zone called the magnetosphere and the earth goes through the solar wind shielded by the zone. It gathers some solar ions and gets some ablated by the wind but at a very slow rate. With no magnetic field the upper atmosphere would be scoured by the high speed ions and this would indeed cause larger losses. The lower atmosphere would extend upwards to replace this and so on. I do not know the time scale of this, but with no magnetic field we would have lost all the gases, even water from the earth over the last 4 billion years. Most outgassing are now CO2 and SO2 with methane, helium etc as traces so we would have a sparse unbreathable atmosphere. Bill