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Magnetic Poles May Be About To Flip
AGD writes "According to the Guardian, Earth's magnetic field - the force that protects us from deadly radiation bursts from outer space - is weakening dramatically. . The article goes on to say 'Earth's magnetic field has disappeared many times before -- as a prelude to our magnetic poles flipping over, when north becomes south and vice versa.'"
And here is the link: Poles are about to shift
I'm too stupid to preview.
Yes, but they weren't born by rocks; Homo Erectus or Homo Habilis were also tool-users, right?
I'm not particularly worried about it, but I really do not want to be here when it happens. The earth's magnetic field (ie the magnetosphere, see here and here) has a vital role in keeping tremendous amounts of radiation (least of all from our own sun) away from the planet. Buildings make pretty lousy radiation shields, the average building wouldn't keep you safe from the radiation from the fallout from a nuclear weapon, let alone the massive amounts of radiation which would pour onto the earth without the magnetosphere. Even without the direct effects of the radiation on life-forms (massive deaths, sterility, mutations etc), it would be pretty tough to survive once the solar wind had stripped the atmosphere away from this rock we sit on.
Can this explain it?:
:) (when the last revelsal was presumed to have happened.)
/ interior.html / moon_magnetic_field.html&edu=high c ience/magnetism/magnetic_materials.html&edu=hi gh 9 92152 9 03,837058,00.html
"A planet's magnetosphere is provided through its magnetic field. To create a magnetic field, a planet or moon must have magnetic material such has iron, which is warm enough to move around to form currents within the planet."
And isn't earth(s core) cooling down? - Can't this affect our magnetosphere? If the magnetic materail stop flowing?
My imaginary plot (IMHO):
Now I'm thinging that when earth switched poles, the core coold down, reversal happened, sometime after that earth got hit by a large enough meteor to restart our core (how elese could the core be restarted? there wasn't atomic weapons and the like back in those days, no! Good ol' fashion meteors had to suffice : )). Then earth keept it's (reverse) position till it coold down again, and re-reversed itself again. Sometime after, BAda'BOOM eine large enough meteor struck again, restarted our engine, and we keept on ticking.... untill soon enough (if we think 1000 year or more is soon..) when our core will stop flowing.
Can someone please look up how long ago earth was struck by a large enough meteor to turn earth in to a giant blob of lava? : )
I put my money on lets say 780 000 to one millon years ago
Earth cooling down:
Here's the tricky part; How much must the earth's core cool down for reversal to happen? Because for it to cool down entirilely it will take more than 1000 years.
Reference:
http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/moon
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/physical_s
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
You think that we can pull a scam on businesses similiar to Y2K?
The Y2K bug was not a scam. However it was exploited and hyped by scammers.
I was working for a company in 1996 whose business critical systems running on big VAXen were demostratable to fail on the development machines when the clock was wound forward. They were working on the bugs for years.
And there WERE some Y2K failures. Few enough though, for people to beleive it was a hoax, but this is because most systems were fixed! If nothing were done, many things would have failed with varying degrees.
If nothing had been done, it would not have been hype at all.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If I understand correcty, the accepted one is that Mars's gravity well is too shallow to hold on to an atmosphere of anything lighter than carbon dioxide over geologic time (which among other things means that any terraforming won't be permanent, and that we aren't likely to find *much* water underground).
I used to think this to, but Titan has even less gravity than Mars yet keeps an atmosphere that is about 50% thicker than Earths.
Back in the Claremont/Byrne/Austin days, we survived that, we'll survive this.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
with the Holywood garbage left out.
loz
What I believe is beside the point...a simple google search for "coriolis effect" reveals:
Quote from usatoday.com:
Any teacher who stands up in front of a class and says that Coriolis force determines which way the water flows from a sink or bathtub, should not only read Fraser's Bad Coriolis Web page, but be required to copy it on the blackboard 100 times.
Or, take this much more detailed debunking, containing the following quote:
This is so large that Coriolis forces will be insignificant compared to other fluid phenomena.
Don't take my word for it, look it up yourself...I'm just the messenger ;-)
This effect is real and well-known, but consequences are just beginning to be studied. It will be, after all, the first reversal during human history (self-written, at least). The field magnitude is believed to have dropped about a factor of two since biblical times, based on records of auroral observations, so it appears to be well under way at present. I don't have a handy reference, but I believe there was an article this past year in the Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union ( a weekly newsletter that can be found in most technical libraries).
Some cynical views are expressed here, but it does seem prudent to investigate what our current knowledge would actually predict for effects. One thing sure is that the solar wind is not powerful enough to carry off a significant amount of atmosphere during the short duration (on a geologic time scale) of a reversal. But there may be many other effects, including disturbances of the upper atmosphere, possibly the ozone layer.
To counterbalance the claims about Mars, it's important to note that Venus has no magnetic field at all, but has retained a very dense atmosphere. On the other hand there is almost no water present (left?) in the Venusian atmosphere.
It does take human effort (i.e. funding) to look at these things seriously rather than speculatively.
ThosEM
The sun's magnetic poles switch every 11 years, which just happens to be current flipped. Flipped in last year in Feb.
b _1 .htm
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast15fe
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
This is a sign of what is to come in the future - there will be magnetic pole shifts, earth axis will decline due to precession, weather changes, and to top all of this - the Sun will blow up in 4-5 billion years from now. So, shouldn't we start doing what is really important - just like in Ring World (Larry Niven) and Nemesis (Isaac Asimov), lets develop technology to move this planet around space, but we'll need really good working fusion power-plants to be constant source of energy and we'll need some sort of propulsion to move so much mass. Of-course Asimov's Nemesis shows that the best course of actions is to build huge space stations and move all folks up there, using the planets only as space anchors. These space stations will have to be able to survive any radiation, so they should be protected by artifficial magnetic fields. For now, let's just build a system of huge satellites around this planet that will serve as a radiation shield from the sun.
You can't handle the truth.
We have just seen on /. some story about academical rubbish in the field of Physics. Now we read another bigger rubbish about Earth's magnetic poles. Yes, "bigger" because a Big Bang hoax theory may be still "speculative" as Big Bang itself is still a Big Question. Now that Earth will boil or that migrating birds will get disoriented is pure bullshit as there are tons of facts to show its fallacy. Let me note a few:
The geological record shows lots of inversions occuring during Earth's History. But we are still alive don't we?
For those who studied Mars, well studied it, know that Martian Oceans didn't boil up in a very very old past. Whatever happened there, created a global and massive movement of the hydrosphere some billion years after Mars was formed. I don't see how a magnetic pole inversion would help creating 1km deep canyons in a matter of hours or days. It is very probable that this happened long after the Martian Magnetic Pole turned off.
If anyone cares to look at the Atlantic migrating birds, then he will note that some use both America and Africa to their travel North-South. Before Challenger's expedition (the ship, not the shuttle), people considered this as one of the evidences that these continents were much closer together in the past, as the zigzag pattern of migration turned into a nearly straight line.
Some birds may highly depend on the magnetic field to travel. But birds have been travelling around earth for a period much longer than most modern mammals (note: marsupials and placentarians are very recent additions to Earth's biota). Have we seen major extinctions of birds during Earth's magnetic flip-flops?
As far as I know, the Atlantic had plenty of water since Jurassic times. Challenger's expedition made several analysis of the magnetic properties of the bottom of the Atlantic. It showed a surface where the magnetic field changed direction sequently during the several millions of years, since Atlantic was formed.
There is a theory that claims that for some millions of years, Earth had no magnetic field - during the megafrost that happened between Archaic and Cambric. I don't know if this is correct but, if so, it seems that Life lived and passed well enough this terrible period.
Well, probably, any pole flip-flop may have its consequences on Earth and its inhabitants. But claiming it as the End of the World is the purest BS. This is Bad Science(TM) that many academics love to drop out over the masses. On one side they love to consider themselves as The Temple of Knowledge and save it from hoaxers, marginals, dissidents and heretics. On the other side they play no better than those clerics in Middle Ages, that at every sighting of a comet would cry over the crows "Armageddon! Armageddon is coming". Time to get more serious and sobber.
From Frazier's Bad Coriolis...
Is it possible to detect the Earth's rotation in a draining sink?
Yes, but it is very difficult. Because the Coriolis force is so small, one must go to extraordinary lengths to detect it. But, it has been done. You cannot use an ordinary sink for it lacks the requisite circular symmetry: its oval shape and off-center drain render any results suspect. Those who have succeeded used a smooth pan of about one meter in diameter with a very small hole in the center. A stopper (which could be removed from below so as to not introduce any spurious motion) blocked the hole while the pan was being filled with water. The water was then allowed to sit undisturbed for perhaps a week to let all of the motion die out which was introduced during filling. Then, the stopper was removed (from below). Because the hole was very small, the pan drained slowly indeed. This was necessary, because it takes hours before the tiny Coriolis force could develop sufficient deviation in the draining water for it to produce a circular flow. With these procedures, it was found that the rotation was always cyclonic.
Taken from www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
put the what in the where?
The atmosphere provides most of our protection from cosmic rays. The magnetic field does NOT protect at all over the poles which may explain the ozone holes the pop up from time to time. Yet there is little more cosmic radiation on the ground over the poles then anywhere else.
Sorry pal, but the direction your toilet flushes is due to the shape of your toilet bowl. Only very large weather masses like hurricanes are affected by this. Studies have been done with very accurately cylindrical tubs 2m wide and they ended up draining only about 60% of the time in the expected direction. The idea that water drains one way or another based upon hemisphere as an effect of the earths rotation is purely a myth.
urban legend altert!m l
Water's spin direction is not set by coriolis forces. See: http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.ht
Perhaps you're referring to this.