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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
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.
I kinda expect that. But when they start sliding up is the time to panic.
Table-ized A.I.
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!
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
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.
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.
So, does the South pole shift as well?
Yes.
To where?
Antarctica isn't divided up into countries, so it's moving from Antarctica to Antarctica*. That's like saying it's gone from the middle of nowhere (with penguins) to also the middle of nowhere (with penguins): there's just no way of making that an attention grabbing story, despite the penguins.
*To be technical, magnetic South is near the edge of the sea ice rather than on the continent, which means it's moving from a really cold bit of ocean to another, slightly less cold bit of ocean. While that does entail more penguins, it's still not that interesting.
Blank until
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.
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