Out of Earth Experience

Geology isn't just about the rocks, fossils and volcanoes down here on Earth. A lot of interesting and cool stuff happens up in space that can be just as relevant as what we see here. There are two news stories recently that caught my eye relating to this.
The first story is about how the Sun's magnetic field is about to reverse its polarity. This happens around every 11 years on the Sun, and will potentially cause a few satellite problems, but that's about it. Auroras, such as the Northern Lights, are going to be more visible and frequent after the event too. These magnetic reversals aren't limited to the Sun. The Earth itself has also experienced many magnetic reversals in its life. These reversals are very random and do not tend to have a particular cyclicity, as you can see in the picture below.

Magnetic reversals during the last 160 million years (Picture source: JOCMS)

Currently the Earth's magnetic field is 'normal', and the last reversal occurred around 780,000 years ago. A representation of this can be seen in the diagram below.

Normal and reversed magnetic fields (Picture source: Allochthonous)

The Earth is technically overdue a reversal based on the last few events that occurred, and geoscientists believe that that the next one will occur within the next few hundred thousand years. These changes are driven by the changing currents in the Earth's molten core, and the magnetic poles are drifting all the time - currently magnetic north is drifting by around 10 miles per year. When the next reversal occurs, the magnetic field will first begin to fade, leaving us more susceptible to the Sun's rays, and then when it flips, animals who use the magnetic field may become slightly confused, and there may be some impact on our technology, but it won't be the end of the world!
As I mentioned before, the Sun's reversal won't have as much of an impact on us, but it does show that geology doesn't just happen here on Earth.
The second story in the news relates to the research into how Mars lost its carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. Around 4,000 million years ago, Mars saw a decrease in the amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, causing the planet to cool. As I'm sure you are all aware, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming on Earth, so scientists have been working to see if what happened on Mars would be of any use to here. Rocks from Mars have been found to be siderite rich. Siderite is a mineral that forms during carbonation, where water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere react with rocks containing the mineral olivine. This obviously takes the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which is why scientists are looking into it further. This process already occurs on Earth, but research is being done to discover if there is any way of using this to lock up carbon dioxide from power stations to hopefully reduce global warming.
Like the previous story, this one also shows how there is a clear link between the geology on Earth to the geology elsewhere, and that understanding the processes that have occurred on other planets may have some advantage to improving our knowledge of the geology here.