For some time now, scientists have been a little concerned over an anomaly in the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s so concerning, they even gave it its own name—the South Atlantic anomaly, or SAA for short.

It’s a weird dent in our planet’s protective magnetic bubble, and it’s getting worse for reasons that remain a mystery. Stretching from South America to southern Africa, the SAA is like a bruise on Earth’s magnetic field. Its intensity is so weak that satellites get bombarded with cosmic radiation, astronauts pick up extra rads, and a GPS device might go bonkers.

Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Swarm mission, which involves a trio of satellites launched in 2013 to monitor the magnetic field, we now know the SAA has grown by half the size of Europe since 2014. Researchers published t

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