(OPINION) Without the Earth’s magnetic field, our way of life could not exist. In fact, without it life on our planet could not exist at all.

The magnetosphere is essentially a shield that protects us from the charged particles from the Sun that are constantly bombarding us. Unfortunately, that protective shield is steadily getting weaker.

In fact, scientists tell us that every ten years it is getting about 5 percent weaker.

Needless to say, that has enormous implications for our future.

In addition, the Earth’s magnetic field is becoming more unstable, and there are many that are speculating that an episode of instability may have caused the electrical blackout that we just witnessed in Spain and Portugal.

Officials openly admit that they still don’t know exactly what caused the blackout, but we are being told that it “may have been” caused by a phenomenon known as “induced atmospheric vibration”…

Preliminary reports out of Europe about the massive blackout that left millions powerless say the cause may have been something called “induced atmospheric vibration,” a rare phenomenon where weather changes affect power lines.

The outage was centered in Spain on Monday, where the lack of power caused widespread chaos. Renfe, Spain’s national railway company, said on social media that the “entire national electricity grid was cut off” at 12:30 local time.

It brought parts of Spain and Portugal to a standstill, grounding planes, halting public transport, and forcing some hospitals to suspend routine operations.

Induced atmospheric vibration can happen when there are very rapid changes in temperature or wind speed.

But many have pointed out that temperatures were very normal in Spain when the blackout occurred.

So there is a lot of skepticism about the narrative that we are being given.

This blackout was extremely unusual, and as Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, it looks like we were literally seconds away from “a continent-wide blackout”…

This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.

The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.

The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.

If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.

At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.

And it’s disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred…

What could have caused an event of this magnitude?

Many are suggesting that a hole in the Earth’s magnetic field could have been responsible.

The only reason why we are able to have operational power grids in the first place is due to the protection that the magnetosphere provides. If you are not familiar with the importance of the magnetosphere, the following is a pretty good summary that comes from NASA…

Unlike Mercury, Venus, and Mars, Earth is surrounded by an immense magnetic field called the magnetosphere.

Generated by powerful, dynamic forces at the center of our world, our magnetosphere shields us from erosion of our atmosphere by the solar wind (charged particles our Sun continually spews at us), erosion and particle radiation from coronal mass ejections (massive clouds of energetic and magnetized solar plasma and radiation), and cosmic rays from deep space.

Our magnetosphere plays the role of gatekeeper, repelling this unwanted energy that’s harmful to life on Earth, trapping most of it a safe distance from Earth’s surface in twin doughnut-shaped zones called the Van Allen Belts. CONTINUE