Slashdot Mirror
Magnetic Pole Shift Affects Tampa Airport
RFSSystems writes "I thought this was an amazing and rather rare phenomenon and wanted to share. 'The airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to repaint the numeric designators at each end and change taxiway signage to account for the shift in location of the Earth's magnetic north pole.' It appears that the shifting poles have begun to affect air travel in a somewhat modest way. Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?" I hope the gradualists are right, but scenarios for rapid magnetic pole shift are fun to think about.
I don't much pay attention to poles... um wait...
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
The airport I work at has a second set of signage from when the gradual shift occurs in cycles, making for a 10 degree change in the direction of the runway. Ie, here it will be runway 10-28 becoming runway 09-27. Has nothing to do with birds, happens every decade or so. Ten years after that, itll be back to what it is now.
if we'll see a similar phenomenon with the bee population as we start moving into the warmer months ahead. Perhaps it's not just a cell phone boom that was to blame last year...
8==8 Bones 8==8
Changing magnetic deviation due to movement of the magnetic pole goes on all the time. Runways are numbered according to their magnetic heading, plus or minus five degrees, and they have to keep them up to date, is all.
Two seconds of googling found this comment thread discussing a different runway-renumbering from July of 2009.
Obviously not enough airplane geeks around here...
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
No, that was not the magnetic pole shifting. Stop watching movies like 'The Core.'
The movements of magnetic north have, on many prior occasions, caused airports to have to redesignate their runways. Since it requires updating of all the charts that aircraft are required to carry (not to mention signage on the ground), it's often deferred as long as possible. Tampa doing this isn't really that significant, although I admit that it's kind of neat in a visual-manifestation-of-invisible-phenomenon kind of way.
Wikipedia subsection on the subject.
So we need a burrowing craft made of unobtainium and some bombs to let off in the middle of the earth.
The crew should consist of a nice scientist, a mean scientist and a couple of young hotties.
Plus a rousing film score, a couple of heroic moments and some ironic character arc stuff.
This has happened before, and it'll happen again.
Airport runway numbers are based off their magnetic headings with the last zero removed. So a runway that runs due south/north is 18/36 (i.e., it faces 180 degrees south and 360 degrees north - 0 isn't used). A runway that runs due east/west is 9/27. And so on. When there are parallel runways facing the same direction, the L, C, and R designations are used. A pair for parallel east/west runways are 9R/27L and 9L/27R.
So as the pole drifts this sometimes causes runways to have be renumbered. One previous example is Reagan-National airport in Washington, D.C., where runways 1/19 and 4/22 were originally 18/36 and 3/21.
In 3010, the potatoes triumphed
Your "rapid magnetic pole shift" link is to an article about the (fairly ridiculous) rapid shift of the axis of rotation of the planet rather than the magnetic pole. The two really should not be confused.
Its a change in magnetic variation (deviation is the discrepency in a magnetic compass due to its electromagnitic surroundings). Happens all the time. It's only when the change exceeds certain tollerances that they change the runway numbers. And those tollerances all depend on when that particular airport was last numbered.
The wikipedia entry linked to is talking about a shift in the rotational poles, not the magnetic poles...
no, i don't like getting irradiated by the cosmic radiation, thank you very much
we'll all be living in cement bunkers with no windows, eating mutant irradiated food farmed by farmers in radiation suits
and in geological time, a rapid N-S reorientation will still take what, decades?
and such a shift is still decades away, even if it starts accelerating dramatically, i think... gulp
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The phenomenon of the pole moving is essentially unrelated to this. The earth's magnetic field varies pretty significantly and "magnetic north" at very few spots actually point toward the magnetic north pole. Some parts of the US are 30 degrees off while others are 20 degrees off in the other direction. These magnetic field variances change over time as the magnetic field dances around. Since runway numbers are assigned on the basis of magnetic direction and not true, when the "magnetic variance" changes enough they have to renumber the runways and all of the procedures at the airport. This happens on a regular basis as airports are re-surveyed.
As the airport I use hasn't been resurveyed, when I depart from runway 3 my heading is actually around 043. Many other local airports have been renumbered... but they get to it when they get to it. Not when Russia steals the north pole.
The birds got confused by the discrepancy between runway numbers and magnetic north, couldn't figure out where to land, ran out of fuel, and crashed?
Funny how 10 years ago, I mentioned on /. how the poles could have a thirs axis and that was promoting for change in shifts in the poles, as well as continent changes...and I am not a scientist, but I deducted this from watching how a coin falls on a table when you spin it, if spun as well as forced into a rotation, you could actually see a thrid axis forming...before it stopped turning and fell to the table.
I mentioned this to many climate experts , especially the ones about global warming, as I mentioned that I thought also the year was off (almost like a month off when I looked at when the change in climate happened...such as winter coming later and later, and summer seeming to last longer and longer, or that we just needed to shift or seasons ahead one month...)
and probably as most will think, they thought this to be funny, and not even possible....and yet here is a scientific paper
that says almost the same thing, although in much bigger words.
I hate it when I see you go without anyone listening to you, and then later find someone else gets credit for something you had observed much earlier.
Here is another for you, google has the new google body browser, and I sent the team lead for R&D in 2002 my idea for a image driven search engine replica of vango's body in motion, where the body had layers and based on the layer (muscle, tissue, bone, etc...) you could also filter based on body part. This was to be melded with the medicine.google.com, which was just a more detailed scientific medical journal and reference point for all doctors and hospitals, and never heard a peep.
Looking at their body browser, i am wondering what they think they will use it for, if not for the same idea i mentioned above....i guess only time will tell.
"dont ask me for references, cuz I was drunk when i wrote them."
I remember flying into Daytona Beach Airport. It was the end of a long morning/afternoon flight (8 hours). I was cleared to land and as I lined up on the runway I had a momentary panic attack because the runway number was different than the charts. I thought I was landing at the wrong airport! The number was only 5 degrees off so I didn't think it was the wrong runway (runways generally aren't that closely aligned unless they are parallel).
Still I was cleared to land. The tower controller wasn't having a bird or anything, and I remembered that magnetic poles have been shifting for a while.
Found out later that they just renumbered the runway a couple days before. Either they didn't have that info on ATIS, or I missed it (and the NOTAM).
This flight was in 1988 or 89.
Sure, runways are numbered according to their compass heading, but the omission of the last digit tells me that it doesn't need to be all that accurate. That makes it unlikely that this number is used in navigation.
I'm no pilot, but the only actual function of the runway number I can think of is the visual identification (to make sure the pilot is lining up on the correct runway). What would go wrong if Tampa just kept using the number 18R/36L?
I wouldn't worry about it though, we've survived worse magnetic pole flips.
Of course, back then we were tiny mice and it killed off our Galaxy-traveling Sauropod overlords who forced us to labor mining Vespane Gas (which, naturally, is gone now).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Build the runways on giant wheeled platforms on rails that can be reoriented to the magnetic field so that you never need alter the runways numbers.
magnetic pole shifting is common and a well known phenomenon. it is called magnetic declination. is it so well known, actually, that surveyors have been taking this deviation into account for some 50+ years now. a tool which could be used for adjustment to such measurements is http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomagmodels/Declination.jsp
Why are we still using compass ?
With GPS and INS, the runways could be numbered in relation to ITRF. Of course, continent drift means some renumbering will be needed, but that would be much less frequently.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm buying a good compass, mounting it somewhere immovable, marking north and watching to see if there is any visible change by next year. At the very least it will make straightening out my satellite dish an easier job if i have a compass nearby.
"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." Douglas Adams
I'm surprised that third-world hellhole has the technology to measure such subtle variations in the earth's magnetic field. I would have expected that, much like with Cuba, we would have banned the sale of such things to them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Does Santa live at the magnetic North Pole? Seems like it would be a pain to keep moving your workship around all the time. Maybe he has it mounted on rails?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That cataclysmic theory is for the birds.
It will take out their entire infrastructure, goodbye control :-)
There is evidence in cooling magma Earth's poles can and have changed rapidly. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/62947/title/Geomagnetic_field_flip-flops_in_a_flash
Slashcode won't display it. just use Google Translate.
"Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?"
No. Especially because there are already saner explanations and evidence for them.
Many maps say something like "1 degree declination shift per year" on them, which matters only a little, unless you look at the map 10 years later. Eventually the adjustment adds up. Same for airports. They're renumbering the runways because of YEARS of drift between "true north" and "magnetic north", such that if aircraft use a magnetic compass, maybe "Runway 21" (i.e. at an azimuth of 210 degrees) should actually be "Runway 20" (200 degrees), or something along those lines (someone else has explained the actual terminology).
Why years and years of incrementally changing magnetic declination should have anything to do with dying birds is something only the conspiracy theorists with overactive imaginations can suggest, because it certainly doesn't make any scientific sense. No more sense than any of the other crazy ideas about "catastrophic" pole shifts, which are a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense useful only to sell books and bad movies to the gullible. And, no, it doesn't really matter whether you're talking about "catastrophic" magnetic or geographic pole shifts, because they're both utterly ridiculous. It's only a question of degree. (har har)
When I first started flying most of Florida was on or near the zero isogonic line (meaning that magnetic north = true north). http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://avstop.com/ac/fig8-7.jpg&imgrefurl=http://avstop.com/ac/8-2.html&h=312&w=467&sz=33&tbnid=3K2v1zfxl4_SBM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=128&prev=/images%3Fq%3Disogonic%2Blines&zoom=1&q=isogonic+lines&hl=en&usg=__nCfPrwsREvO8rbUJUiDGLqyEMuw=&sa=X&ei=fSomTeusGoO78gb-nLGLAg&ved=0CCgQ9QEwBQ This line ran through the Bermuda triangle as well as the great lakes, two areas in the world where many ships have been lost. Today there is probably over a 5 degree deviation between true and magnetic north over Florida, and since runway numbers are to the nearest 10 degrees I suppose a few of them might change. It also means that VFR pilots over Florida used to be able to ignore the need to correct their compass headings to match course headings (maps are read in true degrees not magnetic), now they will have to apply the correction to stay on course.
Why do they use magnetic north and not true north?
That way they wouldn't have to renumber runways periodically and reprint maps and charts leading to confusion when someone has an out of date chart.
Most small plane pilots fly close enough to home that they just have to remember their deviation from magnetic north.
Larger private plane and commercial pilots already have electronic equipment that can show them true north.
They already use true north in areas where compass readings are unreliable by appending T to the runway number. Why not extend that to all runways?
I was flying into Des Moines airport shortly after they had to re-number the runways here. The controller cleared me to land on 31 Right, and I asked why it had changed, He explained about the pole shift, and I asked him if the instersecting runway (23) had changed? No it had stayed the same. I asked "Does that mean they will eventuallly be paralell?" (long silence) "We'll have to get back to you on that"
I don't know about Cryllic but in English we spell it "Claus"
Unless you're talking about The Santa Clause.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
If "The Core" taught me anything, its that all we have to do is make a subway train to the core of the Earth, blow up some bombs, and we can restart the magnetic spin. How big a deal is magnetic north moving a few degrees? I bet that would only take a couple nukes at most!
Happened in Falköping, Sweden to:
http://gfx2.aftonbladet-cdn.se/multimedia/dynamic/01365/05s21-pippidea-809_1365286l.jpg
But it was just a retarded truck driver who had drove them over.
People started to talk about fish, bees and some idiots about electromagnetic waves from phone antennas, UFOs, (US) government supposedly spraying barium, strontium and so on into the atmosphere showing pictures of planes with regular trails and saying "OMG OMG OMG!" ... Oh well. And the bees (actually) died from some Monsanto (?) poisoning which also happened to kill bees, which was known.
Funny how everything bad comes from Monsanto but anyway :)
Every once in a while (geologically speaking) the earth's magnetic poles will reverse! No one knows why. And the magnetic field protects us from solar winds and cosmic radiation, which would otherwise destroy earth. What keeps the field going? The earth's molten core. But it's cooling off slowly and one day the magnetic field will be gone and all life on earth will probably end. I propose the next environmental movement be to SAVE THE MAGNETIC FIELDS! ;)
"Based upon the study of lava flows of basalt throughout the world, it has been proposed that the Earth's magnetic field reverses at intervals, ranging from tens of thousands to many millions of years, with an average interval of approximately 300,000 years.[15] However, the last such event, called the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, is observed to have occurred some 780,000 years ago.
There is no clear theory as to how the geomagnetic reversals might have occurred . Some scientists have produced models for the core of the Earth wherein the magnetic field is only quasi-stable and the poles can spontaneously migrate from one orientation to the other over the course of a few hundred to a few thousand years. Other scientists propose that the geodynamo first turns itself off, either spontaneously or through some external action like a comet impact, and then restarts itself with the magnetic "North" pole pointing either North or South. External events are not likely to be routine causes of magnetic field reversals due to the lack of a correlation between the age of impact craters and the timing of reversals. Regardless of the cause, when the magnetic pole flips from one hemisphere to the other this is known as a reversal, whereas temporary dipole tilt variations that take the dipole axis across the equator and then back to the original polarity are known as excursions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_field
As an amateur pilot I knew this 20 years ago and have seen the local strip change its numbers a few times.
Not really news but I guess if you did not know the Magnetic Pole does drift about and is currently moving in an increasing speed towards Siberia (I seem to recall).
So, are we still saying the LHC won't cause any problems? Hmmmmmmmm?
The initial post was a bit off handed joking, but if anyone is really wondering, I have heard a number of discussions with Avian experts. The prevailing opinion is the birds ran into each other and objects when they were scared by fireworks. The areas that have had the birds die are some that have species of birds that congregate in large groups in winter months. Normally they are spread out and the population density is very low. During winter, these birds group into groups of hundreds of thousands of birds and will hang out in the tree tops or wherever is convenient.
New year happens, many people set off fireworks, hundred of thousands of birds take flight at the same time, slam into each other, get stunned, and then drop to the group and die from impact. Also, when you look at the numbers of birds dieing, it is so tiny compared to the total population of the birds, the impact on the species is non-existant.
I learned to fly at Elmendorf AFB, in Anchorage, Alaska back in the early '90s. When I first started flying at the Elmendorf Aero Club, the main runway was runway 05. A few years later, it was redesignated runway 06. Merrill Field, a civilian airport just a couple of miles away, also had to change the primary designation from 06 to 07 at about the same time.
The magnetic poles shift with time, eventually by a significant factor. Since runways are designated by magnetic heading (for example, Elmendorf's runway 06 means the runway is pointed roughly to 60 degrees, and Anchorage International Airport's runway 14 is pointed roughly to 140 degrees), every so often airport management has to redesignate the runways to match the approximate magnetic heading with which the runways are aligned. It's no big deal, and has been happening for as long as there have been runways. All of the speculation at the end of TFS about "...shifting poles finally starting to affect air travel..." and "falling birds" is alarmist nonsense.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
As a pilot, I can tell you there's a shit ton of stuff to do before you land, you don't have time to break out the sextant. Much better that the airport is inconvenienced once every 10 years than every pilot every time they land.
How about LOOKING at the runway? Most of the sane world uses this ingenious method to navigate the world. Perhaps pilots could consider this too?
Everyone knows the dead birds are due to HAARP and weather modification but are afraid to say it. Come on people! Break out the tinfoil hats and fire up the conspiracy theory machine.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Does anyone remember that great movie called "The Core"....just my opinion :)
Why the hell does a summary about an article on magnetic pole wandering end with a mislabelled link to a wikipedia article about pseudo-scientific rapid geographic pole shifting?
How is there a conspiracy to change the magnetic pole? Never heard of this.
Quit tooting your own horn, dude. This happens on a regular basis to about everyone here. And on the flip side, most people here are smart enough to know that they had many more bad suppositions that ended up to be false. Sorry, but this is how the world works. =(
I'm Canadian you insensitve clod. We use True North (coincidentally Strong and Free) for runway designations and thus are immune to drifting runway numbers. Let's hope desperately that the Earth's spin axis doesn't start moving!
Strangely... as the years go by, I AM feeling a growing desire to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
I am not a pilot (can you tell?) but long ago did have some business around YZF, YCB, YSY, YCO etc and the runway designations were all True so I thought it would be the same everywhere.
Bad assumption. Much shame.
Thanks for making things right!
TFA says this is a "rare" event but runway renumbering must occur all over the place, more so if the longtitude is orthogonal to the path of the magnetic pole.
Must keep the government airspace handbook editors busy.
Enough already. The poles shift.
Surely the much bigger concern is that it takes them A WEEK to paint a few digits on the runway?!?!
Even where I live in the Caribbean it wouldn't take that long.
FWIW CBC did a nice documentary on this that covers the process of measuring the shifts, the airport phenominon, what might happen in when greater shifts occur, etc.
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2010/northgoessouth/
Not sure it will be playable globally, but it's worth a shot:
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/video.html?ID=1678474875
Haha - the pole shift wiki article you linked to is about rapid shift of the rotational axis of the Earth NOT the magnetic axis!!!
There was a Nova episode about the changes in the Earth's magnetic field, and the polarity reversal, among other things.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/
I guess I'm going to start having to start waving my iphone in a figure-8 motion instead of :)
the infinity motion to calibrate the magnetic compass...
The birds probably died because they ate some of the dead fish, which suggests the fist were poisoned by something, possibly picked up and dumped in the water by said tornado. Speculation on my part, but there were dead fish too. I don't think I'd drink the water there...
Reading compasses is NOT straight forward. Both declination (the angle between magnetic north and true north) and deviation (the error induced in a compass by local magnetic fields) must be considered in calculating the true direction. The magnetic north shifts constantly and navigation maps are updated periodically in order to reflect this changing. If you don't calculate your course properly (or if you "lost" the skill), you might wind up in interesting places when electronics fail you.
This is all entry level navigation stuff and it's blatantly obvious that unlike magnetic north, geographic north never changes. Using geographic north as a reference on an air strip saves you a lot of paint.
Pre-emptive strike on smart arses: The calculation of the true north remains the same even if magnetic north and south decide to trade places.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Yes, and I hope the spherical Earth theorists are right too. Nice precistroll.
The death of hundreds of birds who have been found friday 7th on the streets is reported by a major italian newspaper.
Here is the Google Translate version (that su*ks a little bit: "memory" should be translated by "death" in the title).
There is no escape....
Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?"
This is a falsifiable hypothesis. Birds use the earths magnetic field for navigation, so if it were the cause of their deaths one would expect them to be in the wrong place, either having migrated to somewhere with the wrong temperatures or not enough food or some similar condition in which they are unable to survive. Bird scientists have records about the normal migration patterns of bird populations and where they normally are at various times of the year. A simple comparison of data will answer the question "did these birds die in a place where they normally wouldn't be found at that time of year" and if the answer is no then the hypothesis is refuted. If the answer is yes then we may have something worth investigating. Anyone up for it?
This is business as normal. The magnetic pole has always wandered around. Most major airports managed to renumber runways in a single night. The renumbering will be announced in NOTAMs then in “night 0” numbers will be repainted, signs changed and AIP updated. A few hours later it is as if old numbers never existed. London Stansted has done this on 2010-07-02 while nearby Cambridge airport at current rates of change will have about 40 years until having to renumber.
So runways get renumbered but it's still a rare event, even looking at the scope of an entire country.
The whole problem could be killed at a pen stroke by switching by basing runway designators on geographic north but for a bunch of reasons including tradition runway designators are based on magnetic runway heading.
As an Airline Transport pilot I can tell you this is very common and a normal occurrence. I can assure you we know the difference between magnetic north and true north, and we know which one to use when. Additionally when we are flight planning we use true north corrected to magnetic north. Our maps (sectionals, WAC charts etc.) provide "isogonic lines" which tell us what to subtract or add to get to magnetic north, additionally we need to account for winds, and any compass error.
This is NOT an unusual occurrence! Runway number are based on magnetic direction (to the nearest 10 degrees). When I started my pilot training at KADS in Addison, TX in 1978, the deviation was 5 degrees; now, it is about 6. However, due to the runway numbers (15/31), we are not yet at the point of renumbering. It will happen, and the world will not collapse.
The there may things to worrry about in this world, but this is not one of them.
Dead bird and fish? That was from a release of phosphene gas. It was taken from Iraq and stored in the northern midwest. During shipment, the airplane had a "malfunction" and a small cloud was released. Go back to bed America, your government is in control.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.