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North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux
National Geographic is reporting that the migration of Earth's magnetic pole has accelerated again and is now racing in Russia's direction at a blazing 40 miles per year. This movement began in earnest around 1904 at about 9 miles per year and has been accelerating since. "Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock. This creates a 'dynamo' that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia. 'It's too difficult to forecast,' Chulliat said. Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction."
...magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia
Well everything is backwards in Soviet Russia. It was only a matter of time before magnetic North pointed South.
In Soviet Russia North Pole comes to YOU!
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Yet another impact of "global warming". Heating the globe is melting the no-longer-solid iron center. Yikes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
I remember reading/hearing in geology (or astronomy? whatever) class that every so-many-thousands of years, the magnetic poles just switch.
If i'm not just making that up, then this is the first articles of many we'll see...
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
It is actually pretty cool that this happens at the time our technology is so advanced that we can have electronic compasses that simply use GPS to figure out where they are so they can point to the geographic north pole, instead of towards the magnetic one. Imagine how inconvenient it would have been for people if this had happened a view hundred years earlier; they would have to do some extra calculations to navigate their ships.
Yay for technology!
Russia is not that bad they just lunched D-12!!
this comes out to be 4.81872031 inches per minute.
This article covers it...
http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/02/is_the_earths_magnetic_field_a.php
I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.
This explains why paper notes I've left on my fridge with magnets keep sliding down. So in this conspiracy, the magnetic reversal is the blame of either the Russians or the makers of sticky note paper.
So it's NOT 40 miles, it's 64 km.
64 km / 365.25 days = 175.2224503764545 meters per day, 7.300935432352271 meters per hour, 12.16822572058712 cm per minute, 20.28037620097853 mm per second.
That's 2.3 centimeters per second. Forget global warming, it's the Earth axis that's moving and screwing everything. On Christmas day, snow was fucking MELTING over here and we're way up north. Melting snow used to be for the beginning of march.
2012. Galaxy/universe pole shift. It's happening, wether we understand it or not.
Alright, who fired D.E.S.T.I.N.I.?
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As a Canadian, I feel there's only one rational response to the Russians taking our magnetic north pole (which is sort of owned by the whole of humanity and indeed the planet itself, but has been held in our trust for some time).
All out nuclear war.
And the only downside is nuclear winter! Winter! We can handle a few more months of that each year, easy. It's win-win, really!
Please help this simpleton to understand.
North pole shifts towards Russia, how about the South pole?
It takes two to tango, right?
So, does the South pole shift as well? To where?
A sincere thank from this simpleton for anyone who can help out !
That's 2.3 centimeters per second. Forget global warming, it's the Earth axis that's moving and screwing everything. On Christmas day, snow was fucking MELTING over here and we're way up north. Melting snow used to be for the beginning of march.
Don't be ridiculous. We have humans now on the planet, AND the magnetic core is shifting. Coincidence? I think not.
If we plot C02 emissions alongside the rate of change of the magnetic north pole, even a 5th grade could see they're correlated.
Humans are to blame for magnetic drift.
QED.
As a Canadian I hope we do not lose the national treasure of having the Pole anytime soon!
Shh.
We cannot allow a magnetic pole gap!
TFA is only about north. South is moving also, but not nearly as much. Two magnetic poles are not a rigid dipole. Maybe in the core, but at the surface they're fairly independent. Given this, it's quite possible that past geomagnetic events were not 'reversals' with north and south sliding past each other and popping out the other side. Rather north and south might wander far enough out of opposite that the Earth's external magnetic field is far off center, and/or very strong over some parts but weak over others. Conceivably they could 'collapse' by becoming too close. The magnetic field would appear to go away although the generator (and whatever drives it) is still operating. I think this makes more sense than the direct reversal in that it assumes the generator to stop operating, which I find unlikely, and start again of its own accord, which smacks of a planetary "and then a miracle occurs". The data does support this hypothesis as being at lest possible. In 2005 magnetic north of 500 miles from true north, while magnetic south was 1750 miles from true south. Either the dipole is off center, which contradicts the generator idea, or the dipole is bent.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
an East Pole so that we can have a Western and Eastern Hemisphere?
Global warming!! After all, it explains everything else...
Like a flux capacitor? Global warming? We're all doomed!
40 miles per year? That's a speed, not an acceleration.
It started at 9 miles per year. Source: TFS OR TFA
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
First the Russians tried to claim most of the North Pole by saying it was in their territorial waters. Soon, they're gonna try claiming the magnetic North Pole too.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
In Soviet Russia, Compass needle points to YOU!
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
It's a usrr supper weapon
Much like Borscht!
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Without a magnetic field to stop the solar wind, satellites tend to die.
Granted, GPS is military and not LEO, so it might be built a bit better than most.
magnetic north pointed north!
Don't bother trying to explain the facts to this asshat and his illiterate moderator. This is Slashdot. People rarely pull their head from their ass long enough to learn something. They all think they're too smart for that nonsense.
Yeah, been saying this for a year + now. There is an intruder in the Solar system that NASA is not talking about (and why would they?) causing this magnetic influence. This, and many more global dots need to be connected to understand the very broad implications this has on Earth. The intruder happens to be a highly magnetic planetary SYSTEM that has been causing the accelerated global changes to the weather and sea level that will lead to a massive global catastrophe. blackcrow.
I really can't tell whether you're kidding or not.
the real question is when will they start blaming this shift on the american public?
Ahh ok, that does explain alot.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
I am absolutely serious, you need to know that. I have a great deal of information on this as it is my all-consuming activity now, between my 2 businesses, singing a new girlfriend. Blackcrow.
Will this mean Santa will wear one of those furry Russian hats?
I always wanted one for Christmas, I think my chances are getting better.
I think you've had plenty of "time to read or think about" global warming, unless you never learned to read.
I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift. I can't find the link right now to the information I found truly interesting (correlation of past poles with existing glaciers) but there's a fair amount of info out there about it. (Some people are correlating it with 2012/doomsday, so be forewarned.)
Oh good grief. TFA is about movement of the magnetic north pole. This has nothing whatever to do with the axis of rotation of the Earth, or its axial tilt. A wandering magnetic pole isn't going to cause glaciers, or probably any other climatic effect for that matter. A useless compass is about the maximum inconvenience you're likely to encounter. I suspect this "fair amount of info" about glaciation you're referring to is found on the same web sites as the 2012 apocalyptic garbage you seem to believe.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
In 2001, the North Magnetic Pole was determined by the Geological Survey of Canada to lie near Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 8118N 11048W. It was estimated to be at 8242N 11424W in 2005.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
I blame Global Warming!!! ^H^H^H^H^H^H umm, I mean Climate Change
Some put a supergate in the Solar system and seems like we did not kill all of ORI.
I'm bored so I'll throw in. Please don't think I'm condescending. I'm just stuck in a hotel room.
People often get confused here. What is shifting is the magnetic pole, not the geographic pole. Both the North magnetic and South magnetic poles are shifting at some rate, the northern one moving more rapidly than the southern one. The geographic pole is not at issue here, only the magnetic one. The physical geographic north pole coincides with the rotational axis of the planet which "wobbles" by a known amount (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession)
The magnetic poles are both effects of some deeper physical process that occurs within the planet. The popular theory at the moment is that the Earth contains an iron core which is rotating rapidly, causing the magnetic field we know and love. It has been sufficiently proven (for a lot of people) that the poles:
1. Have shifted multiple times throughout history
2. Are not rigidly dipolar. Meaning that the southern magnetic pole is not directly opposite of the northern magnetic pole.
You can expect the magnetic poles to shift more rapidly as time goes on until they again stabilize at some point in the future.
As far as the glacial theory goes, what you've read concerns various theories that the outer crust of the Earth, known as the asthenosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenosphere) has shifted rapidly and on a global scale. These shifts would present themselves catastrophically and have massive global effects, such as causing the "then" apparent geographic poles to rapidly move "somewhere else". It should be noted that only the outer crust of the planet would be expected to move (and everything on the crust along with it). The rest of the planet would maintain its previous rotational axis. This theory, while tantalizing, is not widely accepted among most geologists for a number of reasons. Refer to the following for more on that:
http://survive2012.com/index.php/how-do-poles-shift.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_hancock
I love those theories, they're interesting as heck, but I have to admit the evidence to support them is more than a little thin.
Hooray, what I must assume is deliberate ignorance.
Look, educate yourself on the difference between the MAGNETIC north pole (the one defined by the magnetic field, probably caused by movement in the molten core of the earth, who's only serious influence on the earth is the direction compasses (including the ones inside a bird's head) point) and the GEOGRAPHIC north pole (the one defined by the rotation of the earth as a whole, which defines the coldest parts of the world).
The MAGNETIC north pole drifts constantly and flips occasionally (though not what one might call "regularly"). This is not accompanied by any cataclysmic extinction event, and takes place over dozens or even hundreds of years. It did not happen during the Mayan or Egyptian cultures, and unless you think they were sending probes to the mid-Atlantic ridge they were unlikely to even be aware of it much what able to predict it better then modern science (which says the field will probably begin flipping sometime in the next 10 to 200,000 years). The magnetic north pole has no influence over how cold it is in any given place on earth.
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever. If it did flip, the most obvious sign would be that the sun would rise in what we currently think of as the west, and set in what is now the east. Also, all the stuff that got flung into space as the earth stopped spinning suddenly and then started up again in the opposite direction. Or if it happened more gradually, summers and winters would gradually get more extreme until the entire world spent half of every year (as opposed to half of every day) in the sun, and the other half in the shade, at which time the trend would reverse until it came to a rest exactly as it is now but with the sun rising in what was the west and setting in what was the east. Both methods would take similarly ludicrous amounts of energy, and probably kill most large animals and plants.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
First of all, allow me to commend you for the perfect analogy — laws are programs, and law-making is programming... Now, to answer your questions...
Linux kernel is reviewed by thousands of people back and forth all the time. There are automatic tools verifying syntactic and even (rudimentary) semantic correctness. Thousands of "tinderboxes" test any changes for hours every days and report any deviations. The history of changes (diffs) is publicly available at all times, studied and discussed by even more people.
The two thousands pages of the bill in question has never been read in full by a single person — and when such a feat was undertaken, by the time the hero finished, the bill was already amended to bribe another Senator, etc. No automatic verification tools exist, of course — even a spell-checker would break. The entire country will be the tinderbox — production testing the below alpha-quality software. Oh, and the earlier prototypes (State-wide programs) have been failures...
And you object to somebody rejecting that software because it is too complex? What happened to coding guidelines, with each function and non-trivial block being carefully commented?
The metric is very simple — if I can't finish reading (and understanding!) it without somebody "committing" a significant change somewhere, it is too long... The "Senate version" was moved to vote after an all-nigher in the Speaker's office, for crying out loud. All those fancy promises (by the most technically advanced Administration, like, ever, dude) of legislation being posted online for days prior to vote have turned into lies. Unreadable, spaghetti-like code, no testing, and not even code review. Who could possibly object?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The GPS receiver can also calculate heading based on the Doppler velocities (again, assuming that the GPS receiver is moving). This is how many commercial GPS receivers calculate speed (rather than using position differentials, which are noiser over the short term).
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever.
Maybe not but it does exhibit axial precession which has a period of approximately 26,000 years [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession_(astronomy)"]
Yes. The personal is political.
Or did you miss that mantra of The Left from the 70s?
That was when The Left gave up being centrist and became openly totalitarian (i.e. their ideology must be ingrated into the total of human activities).
Probably off conspiring again with the global scientist supermafia you guys uncovered, remember?
one thing i've noticed is once a society gets organized it doesn't take long for tech to go exponential. I wouldn't be surprised if the timeline of pole flips of the past matched up with times when dinosaurs or whatever reached a point where they had superconductors and whatnot and as a side effect messed with the earth's dynamo.
Uh oh...
This oughta keep all our psychic friends happy..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Reproduction... meh... not going so well.
I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift.
Umm ... Are you aware that the reason it's cold at the poles has nothing to do with the earth's magnetic field, but rather the weaker intensity of sunlight at high latitudes? Were you sick on that day in third grade?
It's a particularly interesting topic if you look at the archaeological records of our past; specifically, the polar relation/geographic locations of Egyptian, Mayan, and other ancient peoples' religious/whatever sites. They seem to predict a pole shift, or at least make subtle suggestion to one occurring in the past.
The last geomagnetic reversal took place 780,000 years ago. So, bzzt, no.
Please turn in your geek card on the way out.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
apt. off topic. But, apt.
IIRCC the magnetic poles of the Earth are sort of "weak spots" in the magnetosphere's protection against cosmic rays and charged particles from the sun, evidenced by the Auroras. If the pole moved over Russia won't that cause possible radiation/EMI issues?
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever. If it did flip, the most obvious sign would be that the sun would rise in what we currently think of as the west, and set in what is now the east.
Second most obvious sign. The first most obvious sign would be the kinetic energy of the shift ripping the Earth apart. IOW, it ain't going to happen barring some uberaliens or the Hand Of God adding that amount of energy to the system. You're in Velikovsky territory with *physical* pole shifts.
"Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock...
Last I knew, the Earth's core was made up of two parts, solid iron surrounded by liquid iron and sulphur, and the spinning outer iron & sulphur core is what generates the Earth's magnetic field, not rock.
Impetuous! Homeric!
USSR.
The largest body of evidence for this is found in the striping of the ocean's floor. In the areas where rock material moves up from the mantle and solidifies, the molten rock aligns with the current magnetic field before it cools, and this alignment cannot be changed once the rock becomes solid. The entire ocean floor is banded with a north/south/north/south alignment pattern, implying the reversal is very consistent from a cosmological timescale perspective.
This reversal of the field occurs approximately every 800000 years, with a period of 1000-2000 years around the switch where the magnetic field is disorganized and significantly weaker than normal. This period has very big implications for lifeforms on Earth... obviously not enough to totally end life, but enough to kill lots of animals from various causes (extra solar radiation, messed up internal compass, disrupted migration patterns,etc.).
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Hmm, I can foresee this not being too bad. Maybe Santa will start leaving vodka in my stocking instead of socks.
i always knew santa claus was a soviet. the red suit was the clue
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Absolutely no need to say what the parent said... anybody can differentiate between velocity and acceleration.
I guess some people can't be helped. :-(
40 miles per year is like 12 cm per minute--you could actually watch it go!
Those tricky Russians! Reversing the polarity of Borscht like that...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever.
It does drift, slowly and not by very much, but the main reason it doesn't flip over time (well, change its orientation massively with respect to the rest of the solar system) is that we've got a very large satellite to stabilize us. It's been conjectured that without it, there would be no higher life on Earth because the climate would be just too nasty. Thanks, Moon!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Insightful? Why hasn't this whole thread been modded off-topic? What I see here is a political discussion, nothing about the movement of the magnetic pole due to core flux....
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
In other news, the geographic north is moving eastwards relative to the magnetic north pole. Also, the magnetic south pole is moving eastwards. The geographic south pole is ALSO moving eastwards. Don't you just love spherical geometry?
When you are at the North Pole, no matter what direction you go, you are heading South.
GPS will not show your heading if you are in an airplane. Heading while flying is the direction the nose of the aircraft is pointing while track is the direction the airplane is moving across the ground. GPS without a compass will give you your track along the ground but not your heading if you are flying. This is of course due to the airplane moving through a fluid(air) that is always moving relative to the ground.
Vagueness in law is a feature.
Laws are as specific as the Congress cares to make them. While we think a lack of precision in law is a fault, sometimes they are buggy by design. Many a times, Congress will write something that is intentionally vague, hoping the courts will either sort it out, or go the right way, or essentially make new law as circumstances merit.
As much as we talk about Congress not doing what we want, they know exactly what we want, how we vote, how we feel about issues, etc. The disconnect is that you, me, or other people, all totally do not at all understand what the country as a whole wants, and that is something both political parties are extremely familiar with. They are politicians and they are good at what they do.
In short, we're not going to get better, more civic minded government, until we get better ourselves. I mean, come on, who wants to hear the truth that taxes need to go up and entitlements need to be capped to balance the budget in a meaningful way. WE've known this for 30 years, yet, the voters really do prefer, to buy all this stuff and not pay for it, so what do the pols do? Borrow it.
This is my sig.
People need to stop bitching about the length of this bill because it can easily be summed up in a tidy little package: "Break the backs of the middle class and shovel their money to the insurance companies that paid for the legislation."
If they were actually trying to make medicine affordable they would steer it towards a free market. Look at the price of free market veterinary medicine vs. people medicine.
China independently discovered the compass over a millennia ago. It is literally called the "south pointing device". There was a 50-50 chance of wither direction. Europeans proabbly wanted someting to supplement the North Star when you couldnt see it. In China compasses were used for landscaping, i.e. geomancy. South-facing orientations are more important than north in that craft. Thats probably why the traditional compass points south.
Its only happened once so far - a large storm killed one of two satellites used for pagers in 1994. Since then ground-based cellphones have pretty much replaced pagers.
In 1989 a large solar storm shut down the east Canadian power grid.
In 1859 a monster solar storm knocked out the telegraph system. You could see the aurora all the way to the equator. This storm would probably frymost current satellites and the world's power lines.
The force of the earth's magnetic is enough to convect outer liquid core a few meters every day. Over the course of time this adds up to an extra core rotation in several centuries. This effect was predicted in a long term computer simulation of the earths magnetic field by a Harvard physicist. It was confirmed by Columbia University seismologists who measured seismic velocities anomalies in the earth's core have moved several degrees in three decades of good data, pointing to core super-rotation.
This is not the sudden "earth tipover" anticipated by apocalyptists. But it is an amazing rapid event in geologic time scales.
What everyone seems to miss is that it's going to siberia, that's WEST of canada not east! (well, quite a lot further to the east anyway, they'd mention europe instead)
...be able to see it from her front porch?
Just another day in Paradise
Law which affects every person in a country, or potentially in the world, without choice
Is emigration from a country with bad laws not choice?
It does drift, slowly and not by very much, but the main reason it doesn't flip over time (well, change its orientation massively with respect to the rest of the solar system) is that we've got a very large satellite to stabilize us.
Well, that and angular momentum and the lack of any particular reason that the Earth should suddenly wish to flip over. The only reason (according to current thinking) our pole isn't parallel to the Sun's is that we got whacked by a large, slightly out-of-plane object early in our formation. Tidal forces should eventually bring us back into alignment, I think.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Before you get this new law passed you'll need to bribe each of the damned legislature into signing on. That will result in each exempting themselves, or watering down this law so severely as to no longer allow it to accomplish its original goal(s).
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
If the core is a dynamo, why can't we pull current from the core ? If there is a MAGNETIC FIELD produced by the core there MUST BE an ELECTRIC CURRENT ALSO. Could this solve our power needs FOREVER ?
You've got to be kidding me?!
I'm sure putting dad or grandma down at the first sign of trouble with a $70 shot of pentobarbital would save a ton of money. We could also keep recovering patients in 4x4 stainless steel cages instead of those posh heated hospital rooms. Eliminating medical tort would also save a few pennies on the dollar too.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
anybody ????
Ok...
First, we can't get electric current from a constant magnetic field, only from the changes. Earth's magnetic field doesn't change fast, in fact, somebody already posted the figure of 19cm each minute, over some 64000km* radius that is quite a low frequency. Then, Earth's magnetic field is quite weak to begin with. Even if it was rotating at a hight frequency, it wouldn't carry a lot of energy.
Now, you are right that the field comes from an electric current. It is a strong current, but it flows in a huge amount of conductor so is very weak at any reasonable volume of Earth's core you choose. Anyway, to directly gather that current (without induction), one'd need to probe the Earth's core (on at least two places), what is quite a task.
* At that latitude, it is less than 64000km. I didn't make the calculations, but it is less than 1 turn every year. That is already too low on any practical sense.
Rethinking email
Um, sorry to have to educate you but the geographic north pole wobbles.
> If the core is a dynamo, why can't we pull current from the core ?
No reason at all. Just have to burrow down a few thousand miles and hook up to a few million cubic miles of liquid iron. I suggest that you get right on it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So how about gathering the current via induction ? Isn't induction the basis of wi-tricity ?
The problems with induction are on the first paragraph.
Rethinking email