I want to preface this post with a big thank you to everyone who commented on the Neurological EMP thread; it was a lot of good information and convinced me that unless there's some sort of super-science involved, it's a no-go for how the author
intended it to work.
Now...planetary magnetic fields. A couple years back, I was researching coronal mass ejections and solar storms for a PBEM that I was planning to run. I'm not sure where, but I remember one article (IIRC, it even had some illustrations) mentioned that when
a massive CME hit a planet, that it had the potential to "stretch" or "pull" the magnetic fields out of shape and elongate them in a direction away from the sun and went on to suggest that there could be some unexpected "side effects" of such an event happening.
As I find myself collecting new background material, this time most likely for a serialized story than an actual game, my mind went back to this article and came up with two questions:
Not sure of that but we do have evidence that a large CME can weaken the earth’s magnetic field, and thus allow a lot more of the charged particles down to the atmosphere or surface.
I really don't think changing the shape is at all likely, since the earths magnetic field is created and shaped by our rotating molten iron core.
2. What might be the "side effects" if it did? I have a mental image of a rubber band being stretched away from the sun and then released, snapping back and momentarily (or for more than a few moments) actually brushing/hitting the planet's
surface. If such a thing happened, what sort of damage would occur where the field hit the surface?
Wrong image. the earth’s magnetic field is more akin to a large foam cocoon surrounding the planet: if it deforms, it just lets more of the deforming force reach the surface.
Now we could get some weird-ass variations, a very large CME will pretty much act like an electrical charge in a moving conductor, which == magnetic field, but the main shape of the Earths field wouldn’t change radically.
Now this is presuming a Carrington-level event, which would produce widespread disruption of communications and power, even fires from power lines and stations, visible auroras everywhere, and even higher exposure to radiation for everything on the surface.
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