Oxygen escape from the Earth during geomagnetic reversals: Implications to mass extinction

- Geomagnetic field reversal substantially weakens the protection for the atmosphere.
- Solar wind energizes more oxygen ions to escape when geomagnetic field is weakened.
- Oxygen escape may explain the drop of atmospheric level during mass extinction.
- The causal relation between reversal and mass extinction should be “many-to-one”.
- The simulated oxygen escape rate based on knowledge of Mars support our hypothesis.

The evolution of life is affected by variations of atmospheric oxygen level and geomagnetic field intensity. Oxygen can escape into interplanetary space as ions after gaining momentum from solar wind, but Earth's strong dipole field reduces the momentum transfer efficiency and the ion outflow rate, except for the time of geomagnetic polarity reversals when the field is significantly weakened in strength and becomes Mars-like in morphology. The newest databases available for the Phanerozoic era illustrate that the reversal rate increased and the atmospheric oxygen level decreased when the marine diversity showed a gradual pattern of mass extinctions lasting millions of years. We propose that accumulated oxygen escape during an interval of increased reversal rate could have led to the catastrophic drop of oxygen level, which is known to be a cause of mass extinction. We simulated the oxygen ion escape rate for the Triassic-Jurassic event, using a modified Martian ion escape model with an input of quiet solar wind inferred from Sun-like stars. The results show that geomagnetic reversal could enhance the oxygen escape rate by 3-4 orders only if the magnetic field was extremely weak, even without consideration of space weather effects. This suggests that our hypothesis could be a possible explanation of a correlation between geomagnetic reversals and mass extinction. Therefore, if this causal relation indeed exists, it should be a “many-to-one” scenario rather the previously considered “one-to-one”, and planetary magnetic field should be much more important than previously thought for planetary habitability.