Bad News for Earth's Magnetic Field

jabex writes "Scientific American's website has an article about the overdue magnetic field flip. According to research published in the journal Nature, it could take anywhere from 2000-10000 years to complete. That's a long time without a protective magnetic field."

Comments

no magnetic field, really?

[Bastian]

I'm no geologist, but it seems strange to me that in the process of a magnetic field reversal the earth's magnetic field would just go away for a few thousand years. Wouldn't the field just rotate over time, so that the magnetic north pole continues to drift until it is near the geographic south pole?

The poster is a moron

[psyconaut]

"That's a long time without a protective magnetic field".

Actually, haven't you wondered how life existed during previous flips? We don't lose our protection....it's polarity shifts....

-psy

Re:The poster is a moron

[Phexro]

Thank you, I was about to post something similar.

It's a long time to us puny humans, but it's the blink of an eye in the planetary timescale.

It Came From the Core of the Earth!!!

[dexter riley]

Oh, relax. The Core was just a 1950's science-fiction movie with modern glitzy effects. Unobtanium! Sonic drills punching holes in the sides of mountains! Reversing the ship's polarity! If you had gone in accepting that it was a B movie, minus the men in rubber monster suits, you would have had a much better time.

Anyway, I'll go out on a limb here and recommend you skip The Day After Tomorrow , coming soon to a theater near you.

Magnetic GPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm intrigued. If animals can tell exactly where they are by sensing the magnetic field's "texture" [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/animals.htm l], shouldn't GPS make use of that too? It seems to me that such technology would be a lot cheaper than sending sattelites to the orbit.

Re:Yeah, yeah, yeah...

[BerntB]

Tell me of any seriously revolutionary idea which you know was accepted with open arms by all.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

-- Carl Sagan

Also note that there are quite a few more clowns than very good and misunderstood scientists. :-)

Etc, etc.

Go read a book on the scientific method.

Re:Yeah, yeah, yeah...

[CheshireCatCO]

In other words, you have nothing that you can put forth to show what you're talking about. You're resorting to accusing scientists of censoring your results, when in fact we'd be all *over* something revolutationary and new. History is full of examples of this: GR was generally quickly accepted. So was quantum mechanics (the best and brightest young physicists flocked to it in the early part of the 20th century). The Giant Impact model of the Moon's formation took hold quite quickly, too. Sure, we don't just drop an old position. But scientists will listen to new data and theories and if there's anything there at all, usually you'll find a number of them quickly jumping into the new field. (That's how you make a name for youself, after all.)

Basically, your post has all the hallmarks of a crackpot's rantings, I'm sorry to say.

Go on, ignore the references ya coward! (-:

[leonbrooks]

In other words, you have nothing that you can put forth to show what you're talking about.

So says the man who has not read a word of the two references cited in the GP?

Go back and read them, then try again. Meanwhile...

we'd be all *over* something revolutationary and new

As long as:

• It wasn't too terrifyingly different (ie, not too different from our current worldview - or to put it differently, it has to be modestly "revolutationary and new");
  
• we thought we had a plausible answer to quench it with, or at least weren't more than a hairsbreadth away from figuring it out ourselves;
  
• we don't have to rework too much existing theory if we accept it

Without those qualifiers, your assertion is codswallop.

The Giant Impact model of the Moon's formation took hold quite quickly, too.

Pity it's still under heavy dispute then, isn't it? (-:

You might also want to think about a couple of decades in terms of "quickly accepted" and the difference between acceptance of a theory de novo when contrasted with the acceptance of a theory which has already been abuilding for years.

Maybe it's just me, but I rate the functionality of an idea far more highly than its peer acceptance rate.

usually you'll find a number of them quickly jumping into the new field. (That's how you make a name for youself, after all)

I call bullshit. That's how you get fired, or at least get a black mark on your research record which cripples your career.

The "heroes" adopt incremental improvements ahead of the pack. The vast majority of true pioneers, willing to avidly and openly explore genuinely revolutionary ideas, get pilloried for years, sometimes decades, and many die scorned only to have people come around to an understanding of what they were doing long after they're safely buried.

J Harlan Bretz, for example, was sidelined and scorned for forty years before his ideas were even investigated, and for the justification of hearing one of the investigators who was finally cajoled into actually taking a trip out to look at the Washington badlands for an actual look at the rocks exclaim "how could we have been so blind?"

His sin? Heresy. His theories, which are now mainstream and shatteringly obvious in hindsight, challenged the dominant orthodoxy in geology. They sailed too politically close to ideologically sensitive areas, to "political" boundaries which have absolutely nothing to do with science and everything to do with philosophical prejudice, and which still exist.

It's a brave and stubborn scientist who candidly investigates truly novel theories.

Now get off your ass and read, boy!

Re:Go on, ignore the references ya coward! (-:

[fluffy666]

Maybe it's just me, but I rate the functionality of an idea far more highly than its peer acceptance rate.

It is just you. Personally, I look for theories that are consistent with the evidence.

I call bullshit. That's how you get fired, or at least get a black mark on your research record which cripples your career.

I call prove it.

The vast majority of true pioneers, willing to avidly and openly explore genuinely revolutionary ideas, get pilloried for years, sometimes decades, and many die scorned only to have people come around to an understanding of what they were doing long after they're safely buried.

Nice use of the old False Dichotomy argument there. Apparently Newtonian gravity, the Periodic table, quantum physics, etc, etc. were not revolutions(!), but the discovery of a glacial lake dam burst was. Hmmm.

Geology is an especially good subject for this, swince although people have been studying geology in general (or gathering evidence), the basic framework was not really put in place until the 1970s with the development of plate tectonics. Accurate radiometric dating, micropalentology, stable isotope analysis and many other techniques are also pretty recent - yet often essential in proving or disproving old theories. In turn this means that old educated guesses can be proven or disproven. To point that out and then whine on about heresey is, quite frankly, just silly.

It's a brave and stubborn scientist who candidly investigates truly novel theories.

It's also a very brave scientist/person who can turn around and say 'I was wrong' when the evidence disproves their pet theory. Could you do that?