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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."
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
Especially since the magnetic north pole is actually near the south pole. This is why a magnetic north pole on a compass points north towards the Earth's magnetic south pole.
In Soviet Russia, Compass needle points to YOU!
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
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.
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.
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 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)"]
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.
Better keep an eye out for Carmen Sandiego.
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.
As a resident of the Arctic I can say that all electrical and communication equipment works fine, even during a solar wind. I think it was in 2003 or so when a pretty big solar wind hit the Earth and all the doomsayers were going on about it but nothing happened, nothing at all. We did get a lovely aurora borealis display though!
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
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.
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.
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