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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.
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?
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
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.