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Earth's Magnetic Field Is Acting Up and Geologists Don't Know Why (nature.com)
schwit1 quotes Nature:
Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth's north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet's core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world's geomagnetism experts into a rare move. [T]hey are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 -- but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now.
"The error is increasing all the time," says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Information.... By early 2018, the World Magnetic Model was in trouble. Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field. They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors.
Nature's article was updated on January 9th to inform readers that the release of the corrected World Magnetic Model, which should restore accuracy through the end of 2019, has now been postponed from January 15th to January 30th -- "due to the ongoing US government shutdown."
"The error is increasing all the time," says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Information.... By early 2018, the World Magnetic Model was in trouble. Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field. They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors.
Nature's article was updated on January 9th to inform readers that the release of the corrected World Magnetic Model, which should restore accuracy through the end of 2019, has now been postponed from January 15th to January 30th -- "due to the ongoing US government shutdown."
Time, tide, and the magnetic north pole wait for no man.
Declination needs to be changed every year by serious navigators. More often near the poles. This has been true since before any slashdot reader was born.
The magnetic shift is increasing in complexity and rate of change. This has also been known for a very long time.
We are overdue for a pole shift given our current understanding of the magnetosphere. We might be lucky enough to witness multiple north and south poles, followed by a rapid reversal where every magnetic compass in the world will point the wrong way.
It's a diabolical plan to move the North Pole to Russia so he can steal all those toys! And Trump is in on it!
It's because Nibiru aka PlanetX is nearing. Same thing happened the last time it passed by and it caused the great flood (the Noah's ark one).
Apparently that's why all the world's leaders are visiting Antarctica. Because you can see the planet incoming from there using a telescope.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/hypothetical-planet-x/in-depth/
what matters is how everyone else measures...
For example, in Sydney there is a 200 metres (700 feet) difference between GPS coordinates configured in GDA (based on global standard WGS 84) and AGD (used for most local maps), which is an unacceptably large error for some applications, such as surveying or site location for scuba diving
see : https://www.icsm.gov.au/datum/what-gda2020
Gravity is Worryingly Holding Things Together and Physicists Don't Know Why.
Life Happened and Biologists Don't Know Why.
Uranus is Strangely Dark and Astronomers are Left Holding Their Nose!
The geomagnetic field is dynamic, always has been. Geologists and Geophysicists are interested but not worried. Seismologist do, however, get worried every time the title's author's mother gets out of bed in the morning.
The magnetic field is excluded from the interior of superconductors so point 2 is incorrect. As trivially shown by the use of superconducting magnets in the Large Hadron Collider. See Meissner effect.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Meanwhile, the magnetic pole is getting closer to the cartographic pole, which seems like a good thing overall...
I spy with my third eye a Wilbur Whateley who's been keeping up with the old 'incanting of the Dho formula' shtick...
We are producing too many rare earth magnets. Please think of the children!
Other than aircraft, ships and orienteers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Exactly! Parent is an idiot. Most of the time on boats we don't even have GPS. Sure, every second crew mate has a "professional" hand GPS ... but we don't use it for navigation.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
US Gov got shut down, so magnetic field is failing, like those SSL certs... soon the earth will implode.
"Magnetic navigation is a relic of yesteryear. It only has relevance today in the absence of GPS, which literally everyone has. Nobody uses magnetic compasses anymore."
GPS satellites are within the van Allen belt. What happens to the van Allen belt on magnetic poles reversal scenario is AFAIK not that well understood but if ever those satellites get out of the protection of the van Allen belt, you can possibly say good bye to your GPS system.
Cow farts
One of the mods gets a plus 5 funny for modding cow farts as flamebait!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They only released this story to bring attention to the inability to act upon the shifting magnetic pole due to the partial Government shutdown.
If navigational errors from the old model are close to falling out-of-bounds, then this ought to be publicized. People die when boats collide.
Please explain how you can have a magnet - permanent or electro - without metal. I'd love to see a magnet made from sulfur or phosphorus...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You probably also don't need positional accuracy beyond a few hundred meters by instrument alone. Typically you'll get close enough and eyeball your way the rest of the way. GPS can provide millimeter accuracy - but I never needed that when I sail. It's enough to know that I'll be within a few hundred meters of the port - then I ignore the instruments and watch the coast, rocks, other vessels, buoys, deadheads, and all the other things that can shift around on you (yes, the coast and rocks can shift in geologically active areas).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
And that is why you're supposed to always have a watch at/in contact with the helm. Not just because other boats, but deadheads (trees and semi-submerged containers), shifting shoals, etc.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"? If boats might collide, would it not be better for them to rely on more than one source for this information? This article was politically motivated. When I first saw this article appear, the page was also littered with climate change propaganda.
Why does Paris have to be responsible for defining the kilogram? NOAA puts out a model for US government and commercial use. The information is so useful that other countries have adopted it for their government and commercial use, also. Now the model is not being published because a big baby isn't getting money for a wall that he said would come from Mexico to begin with. Did you know that NOAA is also responsible for 99.999999% of the weather forecast data that is used by private business? And that the CDC helps manage food and water borne illness through the globe and not just in the US? All of those activities are of use to the world and publishing this information helps to improve business and commerce for US companies.
Could someone else publish this model? I am certain it is possible. But sometimes the prestige involved in having that come from your specific country is useful. I think it would be worthwhile for the US to continue to be the source of such useful scientific and commercial knowledge. Are you saying that we should let our position in this slide because of a border wall that nobody really needs? I mean, you are aware that over half of the illegal immigration that occurs these days is by airplane and people overstaying visas, right? My understanding is that the wall will not be high enough to prevent immigrants from coming over by air.
GPS is only interesting if you for some reason want to know the speed over ground. ... in the british channel, 8 - 9 knots was current.
Record 14.8 knots for me
A friend of mine nearly had an accident in the Baltics, along the Finnish coast, far north, for some reason GPS was about 60m off ... he noticed nearly to late that all the rocks are misplaced ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Putin is stealing the north pole for himself! GOD DAMN RUSSIANS.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
The fact that the magnetic field is moving is not news. The problem is that it's moving unpredictably.
The two major geomegnetic field models (the World Magnetic Model and the International Geomagnetic Reference Field) have long included time-varying terms. These predict the magnetic field shape (to about 10th order spherical harmonics, not just the pole location!) for the five years between releases.
Both released a model in 2015, which was expected to be good until the next release in 2020. But the field has not done as the 2015 WMM predicted, so they're making a 2019 release
Wait - so he's not scanning the water? First rule of sailing - eyes on the water at all times. Not just because of rocks, but because of deadheads and other things floating in the water.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Its a secret soviet weapon which allows them to redirect the flow of stuff inside the earth. "Pootn" has just reactivated the tech.
He Might Putin, he Might Takeout.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The change in the magnetic north pole, is also the reason you'll see airports repaint their runway markers from time to time.
The US doesn't have any prestige. The country that invented Jim Crow laws and used nuclear weapons? The country that invaded Iraq on a lie while its media cheered? This wasn't Trump, either, remember when Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital? There isn't a country alive that is more antiscience and antiintellectual and racist and transphobic than America: just look on YouTube of you doubt. Global poll after global poll supports the fact that you have no prestige whatsoever other than in your own patriotic mind, the same patriotism they used to manipulate you into eternal war in Syria.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_magnet
They produce it for employees of US-based companies (some of whom might also be US citizens, but that doesn't often go together) who are working in places which are in "the World" but not in the United States. For an example, one of my classmates at university graduated and joined a wellbore-surveying company called Sperry (HQ in Houston, Texas), and was trained how to do surveying using the WMM in their European base. Since then, he has worked in the Gulf (Persian, not Mexican), the Sahara, the FSU, and for two surveys, in the USA. All for the same company. All using the same model.
Since he steers oil wells to tolerances of under a metre at several kilometres reach, this model moving out of tolerance will be a problem for them. It'll increase the uncertainty in the wellbore's location noticeably, and it's not clear if that'll be a randomly distributed error or a skew one.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Obviously he was scanning the water, or how do you think he noticed the rocks were misplaced?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
GPS can provide millimeter accuracy
No.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
The liquid iron theory is so old and so dumb, why is it always repeated? Curie temperature, you know about it?
From what I know the Earth magnetic field reverses it's poles regularly (in geological scale) and all signs indicate it is happening now. The process takes quite long in human life scale and the intermediate state goes through many poles magnetic field, a weak one and even no magnetic field.
It's not a new news, the magnetic anomalies have been observed for a while and it will have impact on our lives, and I hope that more and more elected politicians will be either scientific savvy, or at least will appreciate its importance, because we will need it more then ever.
From what I know the Earth magnetic field reverses it's poles regularly (in geological scale) and all signs indicate it is happening now.
The world operates on AC not DC.
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"? If boats might collide, would it not be better for them to rely on more than one source for this information? This article was politically motivated. When I first saw this article appear, the page was also littered with climate change propaganda.
Why does Paris have to be responsible for defining the kilogram?
It isn't.
The organisation responsible for that is the International Committee for Weights and Measures. The original prototype was held in Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud, but recently the KG has been redefined using Plank's Constant as a base. The Parisian government nor city of Paris have had no part in this what so ever aside from housing the prototypes.
Copies of the prototype are kept in various places around the world including one in a US NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"? If boats might collide, would it not be better for them to rely on more than one source for this information? This article was politically motivated. When I first saw this article appear, the page was also littered with climate change propaganda.
Why does Paris have to be responsible for defining the kilogram?
It isn't. The organisation responsible for that is the International Committee for Weights and Measures. The original prototype was held in Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud, but recently the KG has been redefined using Plank's Constant as a base. The Parisian government nor city of Paris have had no part in this what so ever aside from housing the prototypes. Copies of the prototype are kept in various places around the world including one in a US NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
I am aware that there is an international organization that actually officially defines the weight of a kilogram. I am also aware that it has been redefined using Plank’s Constant. However, that kilogram of platinum has been used as the “gold standard” of a kilogram for almost 150 years. And that redefinition of the kg does not even officially take place until May. But the mere fact of holding it in Paris has brought prestige to the city as it is mentioned any time someone refers to the prototype.