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Canada Loses North Pole
An anonymous reader submits "The Earth's roaming magnetic pole has moved out of Canada and into international waters as it heads towards Siberia. The magnetic pole has been within Canada's current boundaries for at least the past 400 years and left sometime in the past year after rapidly picking up speed in 2001. If it keeps to its current course and expected speed, it should reach Siberia by the middle of the century. There's speculation that December's tsunami causing earthquake may have been one of the factors causing the pole to move more quickly than predicted."
Good day, gentlemen. As you are no doubt aware, I have perfected a device capable of manipulating the earth's magnetic field. This device has already shifted the position of the earth's poles by a significant margin, and will continue to do so, eventually forcing the poles to swap positions entirely. For this reason, I've christened this latest caper 'Operation Roly-Poley'...
You see, gentlemen, Operation Roly-Poley will continue to destabilize the magnetic field of our fragile world, causing geological and meteorological disturbances on a global scale...that is, of course...unless you pay me...
One hundred billion kajillion fafillion dollaaaars!
(cue dramatic music)
Gentlemen, you have my demands...peace out.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
in a shocking turn of events, Santa Claus takes advantage of his new out-of-borders workshop and cuts elf wages by 50%
Why does everyone always blame Canada?
Maybe they didn't lose it, maybe it was stolen, maybe it snuck off on it's own, maybe it's just on summer vacation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Le monde finit. Les Canadiens disent ce qui continue, eh?
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
For what it's worth, I am a geophysicist...
If by "polar shift", you mean a magnetic reversal, then one will happen, sooner or later. The main field appears to be weaking slowly at the moment. On the other hand, the actual location of the magnetic pole is continually shifting.
Another poster gave a link to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/reversals.ht ml. If you look at some of the quicktime animations of a reversal in progress, you can see what happens to the field at the Earth's surface. The dominant feature of the current field is a dipole field - which is why the field can be nicely approximated to a bar magnet. As a reversal takes place, the dipole component of the field falls in strength, and quadrapole and then octopole features start to dominate - meaning there won't be an actual pair of poles.
The original poster said;
This is mentioned in the original article. Although not impossible, I would tend to think it's pretty unlikely (but my speciality is seismology now, not geomagnetism). Big subduction zone earthquakes, which produce a significant vertical movement of mass, do affect the earth's moment of inertia. This leads to (small) changes in rotation speed and the orientation of the rotation pole. This is because the moment of inertia is dependant on the mass distribtion of the entire earth.
The magnetic field is produced in the liquid outer core. It's in constant motion. There's also a difference in the net rotation of the core relative to the rest of the earth, which causes a continual westward drift of the field. This means the poles are always moving. Ships have been measuring the declination between geographic and magnetic north for centuries - the movement of the magnetic pole isn't uniform.