Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

[Celebration]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1387868

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.
.................

Previous studies have shown that the strength of the Earth's magnetic shield has decreased 10 percent over the past 150 years. During the same period, the north magnetic pole wandered about 685 miles out into the Arctic, according to a new analysis by Stoner.

The rate of the magnetic pole's movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries, the Oregon researchers said.

At the present rate, the north magnetic pole could swing out of northern Canada into Siberia. If that happens, Alaska could lose its Northern Lights, which occur when charged particles streaming away from the sun interact with different gases in Earth's atmosphere.

[Lithos]

1. Hmmm

Siberia has fairly spectacular Northern Lights, so when the magnetic pole moves, I can't see why Canada & Alaska which now mirror them won't continue to have them.

L-

[TallahasseeGrannie]

2. I guess this falls into the category of

"things we can't do anything about." Interesting, though. I have never seen the northern lights.

[electropop]

4. I'm much less worried about the shift than the decrease.

Every few hundred thousand years, the North and South magnetic poles completely reverse in a fairly sudden event. This apparently is preceeded by a weakening of the field (it weakens, passes through zero, and goes positive again). If our field is about to go into a reversal, we will go through a period with no field at all. Since it's the Earth's magnetic field which protects us from massive radiation from space (both from the Sun and from the rest of the Universe), we could be in grave danger. Not to mention the huge disruptions we could expect in communications and power distribution. It would be like one of those giant Solar storms, except far worse.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

5. Now here is a dumb question from a non-science type person

but we have a huge mag lab in Tallahassee. Would the shifting in the poles affecf their cells and experiments?

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/

[electropop]

6. Not a big deal for the lab (no worse than the rest of us).

The lab deals in fields thousands of times stronger than th Earth's natural field, so the natural field is kind of irrelevant.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

7. Cool...thanks

[HeeBGBz]

3. Pole shift

That's gonna suck.

[shawn703]

8. Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote. But the shift could mean Alaska may no longer see the sky lights known as auroras, which might then be more visible in more southerly areas of Siberia and Europe.

The magnetic poles are part of the magnetic field generated by liquid iron in Earth's core and are different from the geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of the planet's rotation.


more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051209/ap_on_sc/earth_magnetic_pole

[wtbymark]

9. approx. every 200,000 years the poles flip

first they weaken, break apart to where there are multiple poles across the Earth and then come together again where the Npole becomes the Spole - we are starting that flip. the last flip lasted 6,000 years - imagine 6,000 years of your compass spinning in circles.

[Crowdance]

10. Do we know when the last flip ocurred?

[DavidDvorkin]

11. Exactly 199,000 years ago!

And we're 1,000 years ahead of schedule because of greed, corruption, and neglect on the part of the Bush administration!

I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. Sometimes, I really do have that kneejerk reaction. :)

[gordianot]

12. Bush is causing Harmonic Disconvergence! LOL

:rofl: That knee jerk reaction can get you every time. Excellent post

[bananas]

13. animation of pole shift

http://www.psc.edu/science/Glatzmaier/glatzmaier.html

[Odin2005]

14. Here comes the flip!

:wow:

[Meldread]

15. Uhh... oh crap...

Compared to Global Warming which event is worse? Magnetic Poles weakening and flipping or global climate change?

We have the ability to produce a magnetic field many times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. Does anyone think it is possible, with enough research and advancement in technology, to produce a field that is capable of surrounding an entire planet? (This would not only be useful for Earth, but for other planets such as Venus and Mars. It would also be useful for the Moon.)

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Climate change is far more important

The weakening and flipping of magnetic poles happens fairly regularly, and doesn't seem linked to extinctions. Climate change almost certainly is.

[Meldread]

17. ...but I think it could lead to mass extinction, couldn't it?

Perhaps I am wrong, but wouldn't the shifting of the magnetic poles completely screw up every animal that migrates using its magnetic fields? If it weakens what about radiation from outer space that would reach the Earth?

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. I think the idea is that migrating animals learn the association

between magnetic north and the route they take, when they travel with the rest of the flock. But they also use visual cues; a small change each year shouldn't affect them that much (birds would have to be a bit flexible to allow for different cross-winds in each year, for instance - they don't fly purely on a magnetic direction).

Reversals happen relatively often (compared to, say, the asteroids thought to be associated with mass extinctions); migrating and non-migrating animals seem to survive them (compared with the extinctions that may be associated with climate change, such as mammoths, giant elk, and so on, at the end of the last Ice Age). Last year a simulation predicted that the solar wind would cause a 'replacement' magnetic field while the earth's filed flipped:

In a paper to be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, Guido Birk and Harald Lesch of the University of Munich, Germany, and Christian Konz of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching report an investigation of exactly what happens when the field is drastically reduced or vanishes altogether.

Their simulations show that the solar wind - the million-kilometre-an-hour stream of hydrogen and helium nuclei from the sun - wraps itself around the Earth in a way that induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere as strong as the original field.

"We were quite surprised about its effectiveness," Lesch says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4985