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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.'"
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.
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?!
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.
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
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.
Then screw global warming. I'm buying that SUV :->
On global warming - much of the evidence is related to the melting of the polar icecaps. If the magnetic fields at the poles have been decreasing over the last 20 years, how much of the melt is due to more energetic radiation sliding down the field (weaker field, bigger V at the pole and greater cross-section of absorption for the energetic particles to penetrate). From memory, I believe that sat surveys of metropolitan areas have shown a decrease of 0.5 degrees in the same period (ground data is polluted by greater ambient temperature from concrete structures, bitumen etc) and its really the pole data that underpins much of the theory. Its not going to be fun when the poles do drift - we could end up with multiple pole pairs with high latitude magnetic effects in current mid-latitude areas. The auroras will be pretty but the disruption to HF radio is going to mean a much greater need for landline communications.
... 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.
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.
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
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?
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....
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!
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).
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
with the Holywood garbage left out.
loz
This kinda freaks me out though..
Berto
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!
The Earth's magnetic field is being temporarily withdrawn while a new business model is developed. Free access to the magnetic field was always a weak business model, and in today's economy is no longer tenable. Once a method for allowing metered access is developed, the magnetic field will be restored.
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.
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 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
"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*
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 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.
Something that we could conceivably do within 50 years if we decided we really wanted to (along the lines of the Manhattan Project).
As opposed to, say, building a Dyson Sphere or some other project that requires either vastly more resources than are available, or materials that we have no idea to produce.
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.