Earth’s magnetic field is deeply ingrained in our lives, even if we can’t perceive it. It interacts with our bodies at all times, even down to the cellular level. And while being immersed in the magnetic field doesn’t directly impact our health day-to-day, blocking this invisible force from reaching our bodies may have some surprising effects.
A new study published in the journal Aging suggests that Earth’s magnetic field may influence how cells produce energy and play a role in how we age. Researchers came to this realization by shielding fruit flies from the magnetic field, which altered their lifespan and physical performance. These effects may all be tied to the magnetic field’s effect on mitochondria, the so-called “powerhouses” of cells that generate much of the energy required for life.
“We live our entire lives within the Earth’s magnetic field. It passes through our bodies, our cells and every living organism on the planet, yet we know surprisingly little about whether and how this invisible force affects the way our cells work,” said study author Lisa Chakrabarti, a biochemist at the University of Nottingham, in a statement.
Experiencing Earth's Magnetic Field
Earth’s magnetic field has been around for at least 3.7 billion years; scientists know this based on 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland that recorded the ancient magnetic field’s strength and direction, as explained in a 2024 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
Explore All OptionsLife on Earth — starting with microbes that likely emerged almost 4 billion years ago — has evolved along the magnetic field since nearly the very beginning.
Perhaps the most well-known benefit of the magnetic field is that it has deflected dangerous levels of radiation from space for most of the planet's history. But beyond its role as a planet-wide shield, the magnetic field is believed to influence cellular processes in organisms in a variety of ways.
“Our results raise the intriguing possibility that the Earth’s magnetic field forms part of the biological environment to which life has adapted throughout evolution. Understanding how cells sense and respond to magnetic fields could ultimately reveal new ways of manipulating mitochondrial function in aging and disease,” said Chakrabarti.
Read More: A Magnetic Field Turned Stripes Into Checkerboards in This Quantum Material
The Magnetic Field's Impact on Cells
The new study got a glimpse of the magnetic field’s potential influence on aging by placing two groups of flies inside a specially designed magnetic shielding system: healthy flies and flies with a defect in Pink1, a gene associated with inherited early-onset Parkinson’s disease in humans.
Once inside the chamber, the flies were subjected to hypomagnetic fields (an environment with near-zero magnetic fields). The researchers found that shielding the Pink1 flies from Earth’s magnetic field increased their lifespan by around 20 percent; however, the hypomagnetic conditions also reduced their physical performance, which the researchers determined by placing the flies at the bottom of a small vial and monitoring how well they climbed up it.
Healthy flies, meanwhile, experienced an inverse reaction to the hypomagnetic conditions, with a reduction in their lifespan and an increase in their physical performance.
Looking Into Mitochondria
The researchers suspect that the source of these effects lies in mitochondria. To detect changes in the mitochondria of the flies, they used high-resolution measurements of mitochondrial respiration, as well as a technique called diamond quantum sensing, which can track the biological processes by which cells make energy, according to the University of Nottingham.
These methods confirmed that mitochondrial energy metabolism changed in the flies when the magnetic field was reduced. The most notable change was an increase in mitochondrial complex II (CII), an enzyme complex that plays a key role in metabolism.
The researchers say that in healthy organisms, increasing CII could place unnecessarily high demands on mitochondria, which would explain the decreased lifespan of the healthy flies. For the flies with the Pink1 deficit, however, an increase in CII may be what extended their lives by compensating for the deficit. This may represent a potential therapeutic benefit of non-invasive hypomagnetic conditions for diseases like Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
These findings suggest that changes in Earth’s magnetic field don’t simply trigger “good” or “bad” effects on all organisms. Rather, it might depend on the health of mitochondria in organisms.
Read More: Earth’s Magnetic Field Flips Regularly — Some Reversals Last 70,000 Years
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Aging: Hypomagnetic fields modulate lifespan, physical ability and mitochondrial metabolism in a Pink1 model of neurodegeneration
- This article references information from a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth: Possible Eoarchean Records of the Geomagnetic Field Preserved in the Isua Supracrustal Belt, Southern West Greenland
- This article references information from the University of Nottingham: Advanced Manufacturing
