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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.'"
The date for the flip will be 5/5/2005, according to Sightings.
How is santa going to navigate under those conditions?
perhaps he better upgrade rudolph.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
And here is the link: Poles are about to shift
I'm too stupid to preview.
'Could be in the next 1000 years', according to the article...
A little less concerning :-)
There can be no particular date.
The change will be gradual, with about a thousand years of no field. But I wont worry about it. There is no precedent of extinction due to pole reversal.
If primitive beings could survive so can we. There must be some mechanism by which the earth wards of the effects. Maybe some thing in ionosphere. It kind of difficult to beleive that something which couldnt make anything extinct 250000 years ago will do it now on a species which spends most of its life under radiation shields(read buildings)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
In addition, many species of migrating animals and birds - from swallows to wildebeests - rely on innate abilities to track Earth's magnetic field. Their fates are impossible to gauge.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Could this be the end of the GNU project?!
http://www.zetatalk.com/poleshft/p00.htm
I'm wondering: how did life survive the other dozens of other times the pole flipped?
What can humans do, besides burrowing or mutating?
Suddenly, global warming (the artificially-induced kind) doesn't seem like that big of a long-term threat.
Australia will become on top of the world and no longer the "arse end of the world". We rule!
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
So are we all going to die from this or not?
I'm fed up with these xenophobic jokes about those crazy Poles and how they are always 'about to flip'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I could be wrong but wasnt the ozone layer formed due to cosmic radiation impacting our O2 atoms and combining them into O3?
This might just fix our ozone hole!
1. Buy 10,000 compasses
2. Scratch out N, S, E, W
3. Replace with (in same order) S, N, W, E
4. Sell on eBay
5. Profit!!!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
First off: we are not all gonna die. It has been 800,000 years since the last time the poles flipped. At that time, our ancestors were walking around, munching on wooly mammoths an giant sloths, etc., armed with such amazing modern tech as sharpened flint and fire. If they can take it, so can we.
Second, we have very little knowledge about how the poles are going to switch. There seems to be two options:
1. The poles are going to disappear, then reappear on opposite sides of the planet.
2. The poles will migrate over the face of the earth until they have effectively flipped over.
However, as geophysics usually shows us, there is a third, and much more complicated option, that is more likely. Simply put, the poles will weaken, and then split up into smaller magnetic zones, which will then wander all over the surface in an extremely complicated manner, and then coalesce on the oppposite sides. If you think this is a crackpot idea, you should check out past issues of Nature.
I'll also point out that no one really knows how the planet's magnetic field is generated. It is DEFINATELY not analogous to a regular bar magnet, because the core of the earth is much too hot to sustain magnetization of iron.
I wouldn't worry folks, one would imagine that in a few years the technology to take space shuttle up and get Bruce Willis to blow the sun will be available.
I imagine that it would be difficult to shield Bruce's lips from the intense heat...(rimshot)
They that would sacrifice their
" ...and if there is no shift, what then? :)"
- you-like's.
Who are you going to prosecute? God Allmighty?
I'll lobby your congresscritters of course. Obviously, if my business model isn't working, it HAS to be the fault of those dirty rotten hackers/file traders/terrorists/communists/pick-whatever-group
With problems like this, legislation should always be the solution.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Then screw global warming. I'm buying that SUV :->
150 years vs millions?
Volcanic activity has fucked with the atmosphere of the planet more than man ever will.
Add into that shit falling from space plus other natural phenomena and it makes our little bump in the road of existence pretty meaningless.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
... Dr Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. 'On Mars, when its magnetic field failed permanently billions of years ago, it led to its atmosphere being boiled off.'
.. steady on there Dr.Murdin! That's quite a brave thing to say as if it's a fact. That's just on theory, and an interesting one to, but you cannot prove this yet. I'm sure there are lots of other reasons why Mars atmosphere is the way it is now.
Whoa
'On Earth, it will heat up the upper atmosphere and send ripples round the world with enormous, unpredictable effects on the climate.'
Arh! I think it will make some lovely daytime aurora, and generally play havoc with electrical equipment.
Mars is exposed to this kind of solar radiation, but it's atmosphere stays fairly chilly! The only solar radiation that seems to affect its temperature is the infra-red kind.
I'm willing to bet this article is nothing more than pre-hype for the movie The Core.
Apparently the effects have been looked for in the fossil record, and, perhaps suprisingly, there is absolutly no evidence of any impact whatsoever. There's no discernable increase in speciation (which would suggest no increase in mutation) or extinction rates.
Presumably 'no magnetic field' recorded in the rocks actually means 'no single stable magnetic field'. Given discussions above about the mechanics of the actual flip I'd have thought it quite likely lots of small chaotic magnetic fields give adequate protection against any major catastophy
Insert joke about tinfoil hat here
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
According to Sightings, it was to happen immediately due to something with planetary alignments -- though I know the last one was May 5, 2000 -- or some other cosmic phenomenon which would immediately accelerate the polar flip drastically.
I really miss that show, though they still play re-runs. I used to sit in front of the TV with a tinfoil hat on.
but take away their infrastructure and they will start struggling.
Take a look at the early Industrial Revolution Cities in England. So overcrowded a plan was needed.
The solution : criminalisation of poverty. That way the poor could be killed or transported.
The sudden loss of computing would be totally devastating in the short term. And for mnay of us that could be as long as we live.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The good old magnetic compass (flanked by the Quartermaster's Balls) is a backup to GPS on ships. Not that you'd get where you want to go smoothly doing compass and celestial navigation. In geek terms, that's like coding in assembly.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'm not really so sure that a flipping or loss of magnetic poles would really be so catastrophic to life as we know it...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
That's just dumb.
The Earth's magnetic field is well known to wander about. Apart from the fact that Magnetic North is currently moving at a measurable speed, lines of aligned particles of iron in rock strata show a clear history of magnetic pole reversals.
The Earth's axis of rotation, on the other hand, is about as fixed as anything can be. The angular momentum of the rotating Earth is huge; you'd need an equally huge external force to shift it. The Earth's magnetic field is puny in comparison, and can't affect rotation in this way.
Apart from the fact this this "theory" contravenes the laws of Physics, there is no geological evidence to support this (frozen mammoths don't count!) and huge amounts of evidence to counter it. All the recent ice ages occured in the (current) north and south latitudes, for example. There are no signs of the sea inundating the land for thousands of miles, which is what would ensue in such a disaster. Plus, there are fragile stalactites that have formed over many thousands of years, and which would shatter if something this dramatic had ever happened - but which are perfectly intact.
Furthermore, human noise would tend to be random and self-cancelling.
As the article states, this is driven by molten iron in the earth's core. Somehow, I doubt that petty human meanderings have penetrated that deep, much less affected the process.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
be sure to use only two data points.
according to another article that somebody else linked above, (here) this conclusion isn't based on an ongoing survey of the earth's magnetic field over the last 20 years (as implied by the observer article), but rather on the comparison of current data to a single set of data taken 20 years ago:
But Ørsted is the first satellite to take a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field for 20 years, and such scant data makes it difficult to predict future shifts.
so while this may make a great shock news story (or hollywood movie plot) it hardly seems like anything approaching significant scientific research worth getting particularly alarmed about.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
[TROLL]
Vote a Republican administration into power, and the next thing you know, the magnetic field is gone.
[/TROLL]
On the bright side, if the poles flip, Earth's north pole will actually be a magnetic north.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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?
Consultant: The MS bug (Magnetic Shift bug) is like the classic Y2K bug.
Businessman: What's that?
Consultant: It involved a near global catastrophy which occured aroung the 19th century. Only the speedy responce by excellent programmers saved civilisation.
Businessman: How does this affect me?
Consultant: You need a team of 25 programmers, at least, to write bug fixes for the software in your toaster so that it can cope with the reversal of the magentic field.
Businessman: But I thought the toaster is AI and can learn these things?
Consultant: Trust me - your toaster needs this because...
Businessman: OK, OK -sigh-, spare me the details... how much?
Consultant: -rubbing hands- Well...
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
"which couldnt make anything extinct 250000 years ago"
Are we REALLY really _re-a-lly_ reeeeeeaaaaaly s-u-r-e about this? The fact that many species managed to survive is no indication of how much did not survive.
I particularly don't care if we humans survive, if it will mean the end of life as we know it (say for example, enough food). We can be very advanced, but if for any reasons growing crops gets harder we'd be in real trouble feeding 5B humans.
unfinished: (adj.)
Does this mean the Earth will want to spin the other direction, or is the Earths spin controlled by other forces, and not magnatism? Besides, what magnetic pole is currently the positive side, and what is the negative side? Also, How would this affect the commercial airlines with their fancy expensive compases? Does it really matter considering that the Earth might have problems when the magetic sphere of protection lets the evil radiation monsters thru the window? We might all jsut get cancer and die, right?
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
I'll also point out that no one really knows how the planet's magnetic field is generated.
Sure we do. It's from dynamo currents caused by convection in the (liquid) outer core.
Magnetic field flips happen when turbulence grows enough to disrupt these patterns briefly.
This is why Jupiter has a much stronger magnetic field than Earth (huge liquid metallic hydrogen layer, and a very powerful internal heat source), and why the moon has almost no magnetic field (no liquid core; the only field is the one that was "frozen in" when the moon first cooled).
Beam me up, Scottie.
For a lark, I did the calculations for artificially imposing a magnetic field if the Earth ever lost its own.
:).
It turns out to be feasible even today, though horribly, horribly expensive. You'd build a mesh of copper cables around the equator (or superconducting, but copper's losses aren't that bad for this). Then you'd slowly ramp up the current until you have a magnetic field comparable in strength to today's.
Ramping up would be slow because of inductive power storage. The current loop and associated magnetic field store a *vast* amount of energy, all of which needs to be provided in order to bring the field up to strength. The present power output of all electrical plants on the planet over a decade or so would do it, if I remember correctly, so this is feasible. The power cost to maintain the field, even with copper cables, is much lower; put, say, a 10% tax on electricity, and you've paid for the extra plants to feed the mesh.
You'd use a mesh instead of a single cable _because_ of the amount of stored energy. If you break the current path of an inductor, current flows anyways, arcing across the gap. This only dies down as resistive losses across the gap dissipate the power stored in the inductor. Think about this - all of the inductor's stored power is dissipated in one place (the break), and we're storing an awfully large amount of power in this current loop. If the loop was a single cable and this cable was broken, you'd get something in the range of a 10-gigaton yield at the point of breakage. A mesh provides many alternate current paths, so breaks from sabotage or just plain wear can be repaired safely (as long as you overspec the current rating enough to allow the other paths to safely take up the load).
A copper cable a hundred metres wide, or ten thousand one-metre cables, would do the trick. You might _have_ to use copper, too; even if you spread the cables out to make a more uniform field near the Earth's surface, field strength near each wire would be much greater than the breakdown point of most superconductors.
We'd probably never bother doing this, but it's a fun thought experiment
I agree, however, playing devils advocate,
i've heard it stated that the black plague that
swept Europe and eliminated a sizable portion
of the population would be invisible in the
fossil record. So...perhaps during the shifts
things significantly sucked at the level of the
individual, but not enough to make a fossil
impact. If I had to bet though I'd go with the
no impact outcome.
The article actually says "could disappear over the next 1,000 years" This could be interperted as it will disappear and be gone for the next 1,000 years OR as it will slowly dissapate over the next 1,000 years. After reading the article the quotes "...show some can last for thousands of years" and "... have lasted only a few weeks" lead me to believe that they believe that IT could happen any time and last 1,000 years with no protection. I wonder how my great childern will look as morlocks?
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
It seems to me that the relevant question should be, "what devices rely on magnetic compasses?". With GPS around I'm not too sure what does. Getting that Compass Merit Badge may get tougher tho.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
On the plus side equatorial auroras should be cool. Can any people better informed confirm if this will happen?
Optic fibre might be fine but what about RAM? I take it that the increase in high energy particles hitting us will randomly flip a few bits? Pretty easily fixed with redundancy but still bad.
This is true, but that's different to what the "HAB Theory" claims. The Earth's inclination, that is, the angle between its axis of rotation and the plane of its orbit around the Sun, does wobble, and the moon plays at least some part in stabilising it. The wobble is pretty slow, though.
:|
What the "HAB Theory" claims - and what is absurd - is that the axis of rotation shifts by 45 degrees every few thousand years, so that the North Pole suddenly pops up in (for example) Madrid, and the South Pole in Christchurch, New Zealand. You'd think someone would have noticed that sort of thing
This kinda freaks me out though..
Berto
You can prove anything in a computer simulation. Whether it will happen or not is a totally different story, but for sure you can get funding if you tweak your variables properly. In geek terms, look at most video games where I can take a rocket blast and still survive, even though my hitpoints are lowered. Sure games are not true simulations, but neither are true simulations perfect, or often even close. It's a focus on one specific item with all the variables included to prove only that point. Believe the simulation worked; don't believe the simulation is correct.
All of a sudden some scientist picks something up, then a few more jump on the bandwagon, and then by the time we see the article, the whole theory is written in stone, even though the article contains very little fact -- for all we (the readers) know it could be pure speculation. The article makes bold statements and doesn't quote any proof. So take it with a huge grain of salt. How do we know that "Gauthier Hulot of the Paris Geophysical Institute" isn't regarded in his field with the same amount of controversy as the Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov who are physicists that supposedly "don't know how to do physics" ?
And then the article mentions Hollywood!?! Yah, that sheds a lot of creditable light on the whole theory. Now are we are either: dealing with a Hollywood film house that picked up the idea from scientists, or scientists who want to ride on the tails of pop culture?
But we all love this dramatic stuff about the world ending, so it's no wonder that everybody -- whether scientist or check-out attendant, mathemetician or word perfect user -- jumps on the bandwagon. Enjoy your drama as we have all done here at slash/dot., but seek proof and fact before believing it will actually affect your real world. There are too many "important" people out there that believe they know what they are talking about or have agendas. It's hardly possible to spend all the needed time (as a reader outside the scientific fields) to gather the facts, proof, and knowledge needed in a world overloaded with information both true and false. Just find a couple articles from scientists that refute one another. That will help to provide a more balanced perspective. For example, read this message board for some real discussion about the theory at hand, instead of discussion about a newspaper article.
For example, you can get some real facts about Field Intensities During Polarity Transitions and Excursions linked from Message #15 in the discussion board.
The articles and theories are very important, but they still exist to be proven wrong, especially when they are relatively new.
Synopsis:
EARTH IS DOOMED!
Solution:
President (played by Morgan Freeman) meets with Special Emergency Response Team, discovers that all primary systems designed to prevent the Destruction of Earth are useless because they were all designed to shoot down missiles from Korea and China. Cabinet advisor recalls a brilliant, 'loose cannon' scientist/oil rig captain/handsome hollywood actor who 'just might be able to save us.'
Handsome actor collects racially-diverse crew including both genders and several archetypes. They build a giant drill, which breaks at the last minute. Handsome actor has flashback to childhood, when he accidentally made a sinkhole in the beach with a toy shovel and is able to dig the remaining 10 miles with his fingernails and teeth.
Team plants Nuclear Device Designed to Save Us All From Certain Death and detonates it, but of course it just makes things worse. Handsome actor inserts wrench into Earth's core, solving the problem, and then dies of radiation poisoning after making love to the attractive, sweedish scientist whose role (other than that) in the movie is as vague as her scientific credentials.
That's just my idea, though. I'm sure theirs will be totally different!
Reversals happen every 250,000 years or so, and as there has not been one for almost a million years, we are due one soon.
What? If there hasn't been one for a million years, I think a much more reasonable conclusion is that the "every 250,000 years" statistic needs some refinement.
The solution, according to the film, to be released next year, involves scientists drilling into Earth's mantle to set off a nuclear blast that will halt the reversal.
Isn't that Hollywood's solution for everything?
If this has happened every 250,000 years, it's obviously not a threat to the existence of life on this planet.
Apparently this article is a flare, to get the public thinking about magnetic field reversal, to hype the upcoming disaster-movie The Core. Expect this story to appear on CNN soon.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
Titan's also a lot colder than Mars.
The criterion for keeping an atmosphere, if I remember correctly, is for the mean velocity of gas molecules at the ambient temperature to be less than 10% of escape velocity. That keeps the fraction of molecules _at_ escape velocity low enough for evaporation to be negligible.
So, a colder world can get away with a shallower gravity well.
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
This whole magnetic field going away thing sounds like it could be very harmful to life on earth. Fortunately for us, Hollywood predicted this incipient crisis, and has come up with the solution.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
I'm sure this was supposed to be a joke, but everyone seems to be saying it so let me point out the obvious flaw. If magnetic recordings of any kind could be affected by the earths magnetic field switching, then you would be able to destroy them by just picking them up and turning them around.
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.
And to think I did a report on this as a high school freshman.
;) Blah, blah blah, radiation, blah blah blah,cancer... :p
But seriously, I seem to remember you can use geological record to track this shift across the ocean floors, which implies, at least to me, that the field didn't nessisarily weaken. I seriously doubt we'll have a huge problem here. Sure, your compass is gonna get screwed the hell up and you'll be buying a new one every few years until they stabilize, but hey...
That said, how hard would it be to create a city sized magnetic field generator? Assuming on the off chance this guy is right and it will substantially weaken. Tie in a couple nuclear power plants an viole! (that's wa-la! in french
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"In many respects, a simpler culture is far more resilient than a complex one."
Change this to "In some respects, a simpler culture may be more resilient than a complex one" and I might agree.
Counterintuitive but true: Complex systems are harder to bring down than simple systems. Complex systems have more redundancy built in. If paths 1 through 10 are cut, you've got paths 11 through 5000 to use as alternates. If paths 1 through 7 are all you've got, you're out of luck.
Complex systems have more individual breakdowns than simple systems because they have more components to break. But, they are less likely to collapse than simple systems.
I agree totally - I was involved in a Y2K re-write. We kept the old system online for kicks (the users could NOT get to it) - dramatic failure at changeover. The new system didn't even burp
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
this seriously stinks of hollywood making up news as a blockbuster is about to be released. they did it before with all those asteroid movies and then again with all those mars movies a few years ago.
from the article:
Paramount's latest sci-fi thriller, The Core - directed by Englishman Jon Amiel, and starring Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart - depicts a world beset by just such a polar reversal, with radiation sweeping the planet.
wtf??
i could live a little longer in this prison
Take a look at the early Industrial Revolution Cities in England. So overcrowded a plan was needed.
The solution : criminalisation of poverty. That way the poor could be killed or transported.
It was the industrial revolution, remember. People were brought into cities by enclosure of agricultural land and demand for labor from industry. Poverty did not increase, it was simply concentrated in the cities. There was no criminalization of poverty other than the workhouse. Transportation of convicts was largely to satisfy the demands of empire-building than to clean up England. There was no plan to deal with poverty; it wasn't really considered a problem. There were no people executed during the industrial revolution in England for the sole reason of poverty.
"So you see, Mr. Bigglesworth, I didn't want to destroy the entire frickin' world, but those Linux geeks really left me no choice. Reversing the earth's magnetic polarity was the only way it could be done without violating the DoJ consent agreement."
"Let's see...Start...Programs...World Control Devices...Disasters...Microsoft...where the hell..?"
"You seem to be trying to destroy the world. Would you like some help with that?"
"Clippy! Oh thank god. Begin 'Gates-Plan-B'. So long, Mr. Stallman. I hope there's a GNU version of 'Microsoft 1000-year Radiation Shield
*maniacal laughter*
Actually, the more you study this stuff the more you worry that some of the them could pose a real threat. Diseases are obvious, as are volcanoes when you realize we haven't had a decent eruption since the early 19th Century... but that even a Tambola-level eruption is nothing compared to a supervolcano like Yellowstone.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Volcanoes release huge amounts aerosols, but do not release large amounts of long-term, climate-altering gases. Nor does the shit falling from space. Though the vastness of the planet is humbling, the amount of CO2 released by human activity actually IS substantial, even on a planetary scale. (CO2 is a trace gas, so it is easier to meaningfully alter its concentration in the atmosphere than to do so for, say, nitrogen.) While global temperatures bounce around, CO2 levels are sweeping up in a near-perfect curve. One can argue whether humans are altering the climate, but there's no question we're increasing CO2 levels markedly.
Tropical forest fires release incredible amounts of CO2. 40% of the CO2 emmissions into the atmosphere in 1997 came from wildfires in Indonesia. Until recently, no one had even considered forest fires as a possible source of atmospheric CO2 increase. How many other things are there we haven't considered? I'm not saying we don't contribute to atmospheric CO2; we just aren't going to solve the problem by buying hybrid cars and windmills. The assumption that humans are the cause of CO2 increase seems to me very arrogant.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"You Global Warmer Nutties. I'll stick with our energy company President and his opinions, after all, he's been good so far. Where is the evidence that the world is warming up because of mankind!?! SHOW ME!"
"AIIIIEEEEE!!!" (SUDDENLY CRUSHED UNDER TONS OF RESEARCH PAPERWORK GETTING DROPPED DIRECTLY ON TOP OF HIM)
the core of the earth is much too hot to sustain magnetization of iron.
/huge/ amount of pressure, ~360 GPa (52,214,400 psi) at the surface of the inner core. even though iron would vaporize at core temperatures under normal pressure, at core pressures it can exist as a stable crystalline structure, epsilon-Fe, that can possibly support magentization. there's actually a theory that the entire inner core may be one giant crystal, but i don't know exactly how that would generate a field or be able to reverse at random.
well, the core of the earth is very hot, true, but it's also under a
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Is this gonna mess up the East and West Poles too?
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?
This has already been covered in DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 10 (October 2000), among the others 19 ways the world could end:
http://www.ldolphin.org/twentyways.html
True, but I think the real scam artists were all the companies/analysts/hacks who convinced PC users that their machine required some sort of Y2K update. Or better yet, the "consultants" advising companies without major computer systems; i.e. office machines only, that they needed to worry about anything (and pay massive consulting fees to get it fixed, of course). That pissed me off every time I read something about it.
If the earth is fucked, living on the moon isn't going to be much better.
The shift in the magnetic fields is being artifically sped up by a secret operation by the united states government. They are forcing the shift through an artificial process being carried out in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. I do not know the technical details, but they are using some type of equipment to send waves into the core of the earth.
This is not some joke or troll post. Clearly you don't believe me, partially because I am posting as AC and for the fact that it sounds totally outrageous, and I clearly will be modded down. But I am posting this anyway so that history will show that someone did know about this while it was happenning.
I have to wonder what definition of "feasible" you're using that includes a project requiring "the present power output of all electrical plants on the planet over a decade" and more copper cable than has ever existed.
The conventional wisdom is that the actual reversal takes centuries, but some new evidence has geologists wondering if it can happen much more quickly, like weeks. We see old magnetic fields frozen in cooled lava, sometimes pointing north, sometimes south. In the last few years, while studying a ~10 million year old basalt flow in the Steens Mountain, Oregon, researchers think they have found a flow that solidified while a reversal was taking place. The bottom portion of the flow points one way, then the orientation gradually changes until the top (middle? -- last to cool) points the other way. We have a pretty good handle on how fast lava cools, and that whole event should only have lasted several weeks. Hard to believe but no one has come up with a great alternative explanation yet. So just may happen VERY quickly when it hits the tipping point. Yet another reason to ask for a GPS for Christmas!
Our technology will have to undergo a severe shift.
I am surprised no one has commented on the fact that the magnetic fields around earth protect the Earth from radiation that _damages_ electronics. When the sun has a solar flare, satellites are knocked out by the radiation. The only reason computers on the planet aren't is because the magnetic fields deflect enough of the radiation to make it harmless to electronics.
Yet, if we don't have a magnetic field to deflect the radiation, we end up with a completely different problem. A solar flare will likely be able to take out a majority of our satellites at first (if they aren't shielded, which most aren't to the degree needed.) Then with no field at all, the electronics on the planet are threatened by the radiation.
Likely very little will happen to us (considering it's just EM radiation mostly, and not radioactive isotopes.) But, There will definitely be a shift in computer construction towards better shielded designs. (because if there isn't, then... well, there won't be any computers working at all.)
~ kjrose
Environmentalists point out that the weakening magnetic field and atmospheric heating over the past 200 years coincide with, and is obviously caused by, an increase in evil industrialism. Protest marches are planned from New York south to Washington DC, then south to New York.
California legislators met in emergency session today and passed new automobile magnetic emission legislation. The magnetic fields of automobiles are now required to be aligned with the Earth's magnetic field and of opposite polarity so as to stress the existing magnetic generator to stay in the present configuration. Experts estimate it will only cost $200 per car and safety is worth the investment.
Australia celebrated for one hour, then began studying how to make use of their new domination of the highly successful Northern Hemisphere. Chinese leaders met to consider what to ignore next.
In medical news, herbal supplement manufacturers point out that natural iron supplements contain particles which experienced past natural reversals, and thus will train your body to help it deal with future changes.
Entertainers point out that they've been working for decades under hot, bright, lights and filming around the world until they don't know which way is up. This hasn't changed them in the least, and they're still just ordinary human beings like you or me, stated a spokesperson for Gardeners To The Stars, makers of fine gardening products just like the assistants to the gardeners of the Stars use but available at quality discount stores near you.
Tomorrow's weather forecast is for increasing temperatures to one-hundredth of a degree higher than yesterday. A gentle wind from the sunrise direction will change to stronger gusty winds from sunriseport, and chance of scattered thunderstorm shields in the area. As always, when a thunderstorm is within view with the sun behind it, take the kids outside to play in natural air and rain until the storm has passed and it is time to seal the house up again.
In sports news: The World Championship of Bowling in Cleveland today was won by a newcomer from Kenya for the third year in a row. He believes his country has produces so many winners because their bowling alley construction program placed them deeper than other countries did. Sources say that oxygen enrichment of some national bowling training facilities is widely rumored but not yet proven.
Our next update will be in three hours, when your sundial is a the midpoint. You should turn off your generator until then and set your laser receiver in standby mode.
This has been a Coherent News Network production, the fastest news ever bounced off the fluorescent sky.
1. If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once.
2. If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points.
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
I am not aware of a database full of detailed fossil information. If there is one, it has data from the past 100 years of fossil studies by a relatively few experts. Back of the envelope... 100 years * 365 days * 1 fossil/day * 50 states * 10 experts/state * 100 countries = 1825 million fossils maximum. That sounds like a lot, but if spread over the 245 million years to the age of the dinosaurs (ignoring all the time before that), it's only 7.4 fossils for each year.
Now, if you had 7.4 samples of animal and plant life worldwide for each year in the past 10,000 years, how much could you learn about whether species had vanished or flourished? How much of anything could you learn based on one random plant or animal from each continent each year -- even if it was alive rather than a stone shadow of a skeleton? As dogs are much less than one percent of all plants and animals, you can't expect even 100 dogs. Could you know if collies or poodles survived? If one sample was taken from each continent, you would have 10,000 penguins, so you might be able to learn a lot about penguins.
So it is hard to know how most life was affected during past magnetic changes. Even if everything was crawling around with blisters on their backs and only plants which were in the shade of the dead neighboring trees survived, how much of that might show in the fossil record? Particularly as everything is closely related to what has already survived several magnetic changes every million years. A million years ago there were primates, and there will be primates after this magnetic change -- whether our one species happens to survive or not. We haven't been around long, and are only likely to show in the fossil record because we've become so numerous that a handful of us might get in situations where we get fossilized during each millenium.
(No, I'm certain there are a lot less than 1825 million fossils which have been studied.)
Woo boy. I can't wait till management hears about this one. And here I thought all that last minute y2k preparation was bad... How many people are gonna be moving to the hills in anticipation of the all-out hell that will come when the swallows and wildebeests go nutty and try to take over the world.
Hmm... I wonder if the programmers from the 70s had enough foresight to incorporate some protection against poleshift and excessive radiation.... I can't wait till someone starts marketing tinfoil shell casemods and making bank. "No really! You really really need it! Save your data! Can withstand up to one boiled atmosphere!"
"consultants"
That's the new word for "salesman" isn't it?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
"So, Bart was actually right, and not Lisa for once.."
That pissed me off, I was taking a physics test and that question was on there. For some reason I remembered that episode of the Simpsons, and answered accordingly citing the Simpsons as the reason for my answer.
I of course was wrong, but I cracked my teacher up (she is an anime freak so thats why I could cite them as evidance)
forget it.
In point of fact, what's being observed is that the magnetic field is declining in strength. It's an inferrence that it will reverse. There are contrary opinions, such as those that show that the energy being lost is not being stored in quadrapoles, octopoles, and so on.
/. are unwilling to consider reading this paper due to where it's published, but if you are willing to evaluate a paper by a PhD with many patents from working at Sandia Labs, try reading this paper. It shows how the magnetic field is declining and not storing this energy in the non-dipole moments.
I realize most readers of
Got Wisdom?
Many thousands of years of calling the pole at the north of the globe a north pole, and it has had enough, and migrating south, where it belongs.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wouldn't worry.
Earth's magnetic fields do not absorb ionized radiation. They deflect it, to the magnetic poles. I.E. Same amount of energy hitting the planet all the time. In today's world, most of the ionized particles are deflected and concentrated to the polar regions. Net effect of a polar shift, atmosphere stays the same size. If anything earth's magnetic fields act like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up charged particles from 5 to 10 times the earths diameter. If the field goes away, no more vacuum cleaner effect, which results in LESS ionized particles hitting earth. (Global cooling, perhaps???)
We've had radar stations and plenty of other sensitive electronics in the polar regions for a long time. Even at concentrated radiation levels, most of it still doesn't get through our atmosphere (14.7PSI). 14.7 PSI is roughly equivilent to a 32 foot/~10 meter column of water. Plenty of shielding.
I finally have a valid excuse for my hopelessly flawed sense of direction.
Time now for some math.
Suppose a swallow is born 500 years from now. It's life span is what, 2-3 years? At the beginning of its life, the earth's magnetic strength is 0.5 as strong as it is today (500 years left/1000). By the end of the swallow's life it is 0.497 as strong (497 years left/1000), for a 0.6% change in magnetic field strength during the course of it's entire life. Less than one percent! Yeah, I think a swallow can deal with that.
If you are born with something (sound, energy, happiness, whatever) that is weaker than it was 1000 years ago, you do not even notice. It's that way all your life, and you cope with it. You never even consider it.
Wrong.
Guess it's time to burn my orienteering merit badge.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
Seriously, on a sheer magnitude scale, which has greater potential to change global climate patterns? Human CO2 production or a significant change in solar radiation? (Not to mention changes in seismic activity resulting from the same fluctuations in the earth's molten core..) The earth is not exactly a stable system.
Only the poles flip. The Earth will still rotate in the direction it does now, so East (defined as "the direction in which a planet rotates") and West ("the other way") will remain the same.
Animals that think of east as "face north then turn right" are screwed, people that think of east "where the sun rises" are okay.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
But the fires would not have started if the climate was not F'd up enough to produce the huge drought that dried the plants.
Incorrect. The drought was precipitated by an el nino condition, which is a naturally occuring phenomenon. Your example is, however, a fine illustration of the simplistic worldview many environmentalists have.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This bit from the story:
makes it seem like an advertisement more than a real story.
I've got another currently feasible experiment that could provide enough power for this, that could likely be implemented over the course of the next 20 years if anyone wanted to do it.
But it's long so if you want to talk about it email me because this thread will probably drop off the map soon. =)
That would be easier to do with your email address.
Or perhaps make a post about the topic in your journal? That's probably the simplest way for us to get into a long discussion without losing context.
I think this is the greatest indication that the original story is just meant to sell a movie plot. "Just" two millennia? Yeah, time to start panicing about the destruction of our GPS satallites (which of course, we probably won't even be using 100 years from now).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Possibly the shift would create magnetic bursts that'd wipe hardrives clean forcing everyone to upgrade to Windows Armageddon. Things are okay. The world may be dying but Bill Gates stock portfolio looks great.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...at the lack of scientific knowledge here on /.
Mars and Venus actually share an important feature -- they've both lost most of their hydrogen. Thus, there's no water on Venus and very little atmosphere at all on Mars.
When there is little protection from Solar winds, molecules in the atmosphere are dissociated into ions. The hydrogen then gets its temperature raised and some of the hydrogen leaks out into space never to return to the gravity well.
Now, I'm not saying that the Earth's atmosphere will all boil off during a magnetic field reversal, but the effects on the ground and to the atmosphere would be profound.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Our functions may be complex, but are our poles simple?
An African or a European swallow?
dd
re: disruption of electronics and satellite crippling
the story did mention this.
and the solar flaring you mention would have to occur at the most incredibly opportune second as the broiling radiation furnace our upper atmosphere will become will begin vaporising those satellites straight away. however they'd already have begun to die from the bombardment they were not designed to handle.
and I have to disagree re: us -- very many things could happen to us. not the least of which would be radiation poisoning/extremely accelerated cancer rates (our solar defenses in our atmosphere will be among the first to go) and possibly the steady loss of our atmosphere altogether (and associated steady heat related deaths) which would most certainly kill us.
(my sig is not directed at you)
- I am made of meat.
First comment:
:0)
There is no real benefit to which way the poles point, the only thing it would do would mean that everyone had to buy or reconfigure their compasses...hmm maybe I've stumbled on to something. Who'd have suspected the quiet compass industry of something so evil
Second comment:
With regards to the frequency of the Earth, the Earth as a whole will have no resonant frequency because it is made up of different sections all of inconsistant phyiscal materials. For a whole object to have a single resonant frequency it must be the same material throughout. You could possibly get a resonant frequency that would shatter parts of the Earth's crust but the impact would be limited through the existance of unconformities, folding and the huge varieties of rocks that make up the crust.
So the comment you should have made is that every substance has a specific resonant frequency.
Just remember that if the world didn't suck we'd all fall off.
If we geeks had had the foresight not to fix things to well the economy would still be buzzing.
You work for Microsoft don't you.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Here in Nottingham if you stole more then the value of a loaf of bread you were hung on the courthouse steps (the fittings for the gallows are still there).
Less than that and you were transported.
The courthouse is a museum now.
Admittedly the law wasn't created to specifically deal with the poor but their lives were held in contempt. TBH if you survived the journey and lived out your sentence you probably ended up better off than back in Nottingham but still, not everyone did.
Whatever you want to call it, it was akin to genocide / slavery and it's a great injustice to those unfortunates and their antipodean descendents to be branded as criminals rather than victims.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm just heartened that a lot of the heavy-duty intercontinental communication is done by fiberoptic. Why don't we start looking more seriously at alternate forms of computing? We've known for decades now that magnetic devices can be unreliable, but there doesn't seem to be a push to change gears.
:P
There are up-and-coming technologies that could be feasible--check out http://www.media.mit.edu/research (MIT Media labs.)
Also, if this is going to be an extremely gradual change, the switchover will be less painful. But has anyone actually tried our standard magnetic-based equipment under an environment equivalent to the one after the pole switch? Or the possible environments *during* the switch? I imagine it'd be like moving a huge magnet over an entire room and seeing if hard drives still work.
And how would one make this seem relevant to the general public? The Y2K fix was so behind-the-scenes that ENTIRELY TOO MANY people dismissed it as hype, when in fact programmers, engineers, IT people worked countless hours to make the transition as smooth as it was. How could one convince the general public that they need different forms of computers in EVERYTHING, from their wristwatches to their air traffic control centers?
I'm just throwing out stuff, here. *shrug*
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I did a short contract for a railway maintenance company back in 1999, and the y2k compliance guy was constantly getting requests for y2k compliance certificates for stuff like railway sleepers, bolts, and well - anything really. Must have done wonders for his self image - knowing what a vital job he was doing LOL :)
First comment: Consider the current generated when the poles switch. Lets hope the switch is gradual else I could see the core heating up quite a bit due to current flow.
Second comment: Everything has a resonant frequency. Even the earth has an overall one eventhough its made up of subcomponents with independent resonant frequencies. (this is known as a beat which in itself has a frequency) I agree though that you will need high sustained power to overcome the damping effects of the various different frequency components within the earth though.
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.
I agree. It's like the recriminations happening now around September 11. Everyone wants to know why nobody did anything to stop people from crashing planes into buildings. Suppose someone had hyped it up years ago, and made a big deal of keeping it from happening? Suppose they were successful? September 11 never would have happened, but we'd probably have people claiming it was bogus, that we were protecting against a non-existent risk, and it was a complete waste of money.
Hindsight is 20/20. People claim Y2K wasn't a big deal because others were actually successul at fixing most of the problems! Y2K rolled over with nary a hitch, causing people to think it must not have been an issue after all. We could have used a high-profile disaster or two, to convince everyone that their Y2K diligence wasn't wasted! (Of course, some scammers did jump on Y2K, but there was a real issue to worry about too.)
Actually, a friend of mine was listening to ham radio during the rollover, and heard about an alarming near-disaster. Apparently, one of the nuclear missile silos in Russia malfunction due to a Y2K bug and got well into the launch sequence before they managed to shut it down! (Far enough that the launch doors were supposedly opened to prepare for a launch.)
Of course, we didn't hear anything about this in the mainstream press, but there was such fear and paranoia about Y2K that they probably hushed up stories that didn't seem serious enough to risk hysteria over... (I heard rumors of other Y2K failures that weren't reported, or were ascribed to some other convenient cause.) Perhaps there were enough actual failures to demonstrate the risk, but if most were covered up, is it any surprise that people now consider the whole thing a hoax?
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
I know that if all the Y2K errors I fixed in 1999 had happened all at once, it would have been a mess! There's a big difference between having 1 to 5 years to find & fix problems, and having everything blow up at once.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.