Earth's magnetic poles on verge of flipping

World Net Daily ^ | December 12, 2003

[gitmo]

The Earth's magnetic field is weakening, and that could lead to a flip in the planet's poles making compasses point south instead of north for the first time in almost a million years, say scientists.

Experts at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco say the field has declined 10 percent in the last 150 years, and suggest a reversal could lead to problems in navigation and a jump in cancer rates with a diminished ozone layer.

"Is a reversal coming? Yeah, it's coming for sure – sometime,'' said geologist Robert Coe of the University of California-Santa Cruz, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Physicists say the average period between pole flips is about 200,000 years, and the last one is believed to have taken place 780,000 years ago, making the next swap long overdue.

According to Harvard University's Jeremy Bloxham, the field could disappear completely within the next 2,000 years if the rate of decline remains constant, but he's not certain if the poles will actually reverse.

"Chances are this is going to die out," he said, reports the San Mateo County Times. "Reversals are pretty rare."

If a flip did take place, it would be over the course of several thousand years, and scientists say it would likely reduce the protective ozone layer, cause glitches in satellites and electronic products, and create a flurry of navigational anomalies as compasses would "cease to be a simple means of navigation," according to Bloxham.

The consequences would be the same if a reversal takes place or the field continues to diminish, with one researcher estimating an additional 100,000 cancer cases annually as people would be subject to more of the sun's harmful rays.

[T'wit]

Good. Everybody will die and we don't have to worry about global warming.

[martin_fierro]

My tinfoil hat is already calibrated. I am prepared.

[RandyRep]

Geez, the UN has to do something quick about this...

It MUST BE electro-magnetic emissions that is causing this.

I know, we could have a Sapporo treaty to reduce radio broadcasts, TV signals, telephone, garage door opener, TV remotes, wireless computer networks, electrical power plants, etc. back to year 1900 levels in order to save our planet.

Oh, wait, perhaps a better sunscreen will solve the problem?

[tubebender]

The late Emil Sepic from here in Eureka wrote a lot on this subject. While doing a google for Emil I came across This

[the invisib1e hand]

everybody hold on!

[Kirkwood]

So has the left blamed President Bush yet?

[Petronski]

If a flip did take place, it would be over the course of several thousand years, and scientists say it would likely reduce the protective ozone layer, cause glitches in satellites and electronic products, and create a flurry of navigational anomalies as compasses would "cease to be a simple means of navigation," according to Bloxham.

WTF is the point of this article?

[scott7278]

If we get everybody to jump at the same time, we might be able to stop it.

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

How will this effect that nuke powered Lightning Gun of Eakers, and it's power ZOT?

[hole_n_one]

Meow!.......................Meow!

[spectre]

"WTF is the point of this article?"

Exactly!

[scott7278]

From the article you linked to, concerning a comet crash being the end of the world:

"A comet or asteroid collides with Earth, and we're all killed or at least seriously shook up. In 1954, for example, a meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, bounced off a radio, and hit a woman on the hip."

Compelling.

[Kirkwood]

So if the magnetic field flip will have an effect on the ozone layer, and the the magnetic field is emitted from the south pole, and if the ozone hole is over the south pole, could there be some causal link between the two??? Maybe the fluctuating ozone hole is entirely natural and just an early indicator of the weakening magnetic field that is making the upper atomosphere more suspectible to solar radiation? Something for conservative scientists to look into.

[tubebender]

I am out of tin foil so I didn't dare read the article...Was there a short audio when you opened it?

[tubebender]

That only works when your parachute doesn't open...

[Reagan is King]

If we'd only signed the Kyoto accord all this could have been prevented...

/sarcasm>

[scott7278]

I didn't hear anything with Mozilla, so I tried it with Internet Explorer. It says, "We tell you only what you need to know."

[Mike Darancette]

The UN must convene a conference and investigate the effect of electric generation and transmission on the Earth's magnetic field.

It surely must be the fault of the developed world and the USA in particular. The USA must pay and pay!

[scott7278]

I've got a theory...the UN knows about it, and that's why they want control of the Internet. From now on, I'm tethering myself to everything. I'm not going to drive anywhere, just walk, and tether myself to anything stationary along the way. I'll crouch low to the ground to have the best possible balance.

When people look at me funny, I'll just laugh at them and scream "Idiots -- we're about to flip!"

It's going to take alot of rope.

[Nathaniel Fischer]

Who else could be responsible?

[Beck_isright]

"The consequences would be the same if a reversal takes place or the field continues to diminish, with one researcher estimating an additional 100,000 cancer cases annually as people would be subject to more of the sun's harmful rays."

Let me know the date when this is due to occur. I want to start smoking. Might as well die of lung cancer instead of skin cancer.

[tubebender]

Thank you. I was afraid to reload it and not hear anything...

[FrankR]

The Earth's magnetic field is weakening, and that could lead to a flip in the planet's poles making compasses point south instead of north for the first time in almost a million years, say scientists.
I thought these things were supposed to happen with Y2K.

Experts at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco say the field has declined 10 percent in the last 150 years, and suggest a reversal could lead to problems in navigation and a jump in cancer rates with a diminished ozone layer.
There's that ozone layer thing again...what is it with these "the sky is falling" liberals...it's always the ozone layer...is this some obsession with words containing a "z"?

"Is a reversal coming? Yeah, it's coming for sure – sometime,'' said geologist Robert Coe of the University of California-Santa Cruz, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Oh God, not the dreaded 'reversal'?

Physicists say the average period between pole flips is about 200,000 years, and the last one is believed to have taken place 780,000 years ago, making the next swap long overdue.
now...just a minute...who was at the last pole flip...you know that one that took place 780,000 years ago...and did they use a Hewlett-Packard test unit then to figure this out? I think that was long before the compass was even invented. Did this article come out of "Science Fiction" comic books, or what?

According to Harvard University's Jeremy Bloxham, the field could disappear completely within the next 2,000 years if the rate of decline remains constant, but he's not certain if the poles will actually reverse.
Hey, I'll just hang out and wait for the next one...I got nothing to do for the next 2,000 years anyway.

"Chances are this is going to die out," he said, reports the San Mateo County Times. "Reversals are pretty rare."
Oh, I see...claim a spectacular headline, then end the story by saying it probably won't happen. I think the word "rare" is an understatement with a [arbitrary] occurance rate of 200,000 years.

If a flip did take place, it would be over the course of several thousand years, and scientists say it would likely reduce the protective ozone layer, cause glitches in satellites and electronic products, and create a flurry of navigational anomalies as compasses would "cease to be a simple means of navigation," according to Bloxham.
Same crap we heard about Y2K.

The consequences would be the same if a reversal takes place or the field continues to diminish, with one researcher estimating an additional 100,000 cancer cases annually as people would be subject to more of the sun's harmful rays.
Hey, life's a gamble...you pays yo' dime and you takes yo' chances. But, some liberal will figure out how to wrangle a few million out of Uncle Sam to "study" what can be done....follow the money.

[WoofDog123]

"If a flip did take place, it would be over the course of several thousand years, and scientists say it would likely reduce the protective ozone layer, cause glitches in satellites and electronic products, and create a flurry of navigational anomalies as compasses would "cease to be a simple means of navigation," according to Bloxham. "

The fields simply moving around would cause aurora to appear in places they have not been seen in human history....or not more than a few times in all human history, at any rate.

[M Kehoe]

If a flip did take place, it would be over the course of several thousand years,...

At what point would the compass point west/east?

5.56mm

[HardStarboard]

>>>At what point would the compass point west/east?<<<

At 270 deg and 90 deg respectively.

I apologize, nobody likes a smartass - sorry!

[M Kehoe]

8^)

5.56mm

[txzman]

Uh, this is serious science, although absolutely no one knows the timing. Don't dismiss until you understand why the controversy started in the first place.

[yonif]

Its the Jewish hold on Earth that is causing this...../sarcasm

[CommandoFrank]

Does this mean when it gets to zero just prior to the 'flip', we'll all float off into space?

Will we have to rename the America's? (N. America will become S. America)

Where will the Northern Lights go?

Will whirl pools rotate in the other direction?

Will pigeons lose their way?

The song "North to Alaska" will no longer be valid...

[Redcloak]

So if the poles flip, does that mean shiney-side out or shiney-side in?

[Jaysun]

Maybe the fluctuating ozone hole is entirely natural and just an early indicator of the weakening magnetic field that is making the upper atomosphere more suspectible to solar radiation?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I work with some gents from NASA. I'd like to know what magnetic fields have to do with the ozone layer???????? The hole that you wrote about is indeed natural. It's been showing up year after year since wild poodles roamed the earth. The reason for the hole is simple. Ozone is created by sunlight. Yep. Sunlight. The long, dark, winters at the pole (lack of sunlight) are the cause of the "depletion" - it's also replenished ever year as the sun becomes less of a stranger to the region. The idea that humans have ANYTHING to do with the ozone layer is ludicrous. Even studies with hugely generous assumptions come up with around .04% as the amount of "heat-trapping gases" that humans contribute. An interesting note about "heat-trapping gases" - a typical old growth forest emits more hydrocarbons than humans ever thought about emitting with an SUV. And just think about all that ammonia that gets set swirling into our atmosphere every time an animal carelessly decides to defecate! So - the nuts are contridictory to the core. They scream animal rights and environmental responsibility, but the animals and forest that they work to save do more "damage" than humans do! The people yelling gloom and doom about global warming or ozone layer destruction are one of three things. A) Liars with an agenda. B) Completely ignorant. C) Class-A Kooks. God's Earth is a wonderful, changing, miraculous thing that humans have neither the capacity or knowledge to effect in the way that the crazies say we do. Thanks for allowing me to ramble.

[henderson field]

And of course to administer this corrective program, the UN needs a lot of extra money. Just deposit in the account of Kofi Annan and it will get to the right places.

[Jaysun]

When people look at me funny, I'll just laugh at them and scream "Idiots -- we're about to flip!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LOL!!!!!!!!!

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Is this new news?
SAGA magazine had an article about that in 1969, complete with artwork showing crashing skyscrapers.
The theory was when the poles flip for a short while the earth will have no stablizing spin so the crust, where we live, will float around like ice in water till t\he flip is complete.

[Jaysun]

Just think, if the magnetic field "flipped" ...........the bar magnets from Radio Shack that read "N" on one end and "S" on the other end would all have to be remade in the exact opposite manner. If anyone needs funding it's our capitalist friends that own and operate the magnet factories. Of course, I guess that the old and otherwise obsolete bar magnets that'll be littering our streets could just be turned over in one's hand in order to make them relevant again. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The liberals have obviously been reduced to a bunch of nakedly feathered "chicks" in the nest that wait with anticipation, and with mouths wide open, for the next UN regurgitation of nonsensical puke.

[happydogdesign]

A recent episode of Nova featured this story, and basically said there may be a higher risk of cancer, but the technological advances by that time would probably be able to cope with it, and there should be lots of really cool auroras.

Excerpt:
"If all the compasses in the world started pointing south rather than north, many people might think something very strange, very unusual, and possibly very dangerous was going on. Doomsayers would have a field day proclaiming the end is nigh, while more rational persons might head straight to scientists for an explanation.

Fortunately, those scientists in the know -- paleomagnetists, to be exact -- would have a ready answer. Such reversals in the Earth's magnetic field, they'd tell you, are, roughly speaking, as common as ice ages. That is, they're terrifically infrequent by human standards, but in geologic terms they happen all the time. As the time line at right shows, hundreds of times in our planet's history the polarity of the magnetic shield ensheathing the globe has gone from "normal," our current orientation to the north, to "reversed," and back again.

The Earth is not alone in this fickleness: The sun's magnetic shield appears to reverse its polarity approximately every 11 years. Even our Milky Way galaxy is magnetized, and experts say it probably reverses its polarity as well. Moreover, while a severe weakening or disappearance of the magnetic field would lay us open to harmful radiation from the sun, there's little evidence to date that "flips" per se inflict any lasting damage (see Impact on Animals).

It might sound as if scientists have all the answers regarding magnetic reversals. But actually they know very little about them. Basic questions haunt researchers: What physical processes within the Earth trigger reversals? Why do the durations and frequencies of both normal and reversed states seem random? Why is there such a disproportionately long normal period between about 121 and 83 million years ago? Why does the reversal rate, at least during the past 160 million years, appear to peak around 12 million years ago?

All these questions remain unanswered, though experts like Dennis Kent, the Rutgers University geologist who supplied NOVA with updated figures for the time line, are hard at work trying to answer them. In the meantime, not to worry. Reversals happen on average only about once every 250,000 years, and they take hundreds if not thousands of years to complete.

Even the weakening currently under way may be a false alarm. The field often gets very weak, then bounces back, never having flipped. As Ron Merrill, a magnetic-field specialist at the University of Washington remarked when asked whether we're in for a reversal: "Ask me in 10,000 years, I'll give you a better answer." So hang on to your compass. For the foreseeable future, it should work as advertised.--Peter Tyson"

[Waco]

"If all the compasses started pointing south...." Hmm maybe that's the reason for all the dumbing down in school. These kids can barely tell time, much less read a compass!!! Hic!

[isom35]

the poles are gonna flip me off? I say "up yours, poles!"

[streetpreacher]

What did Bush know and when did he know it?!!

[cajun-jack]

Art Bell has people on his show talking about this...my question is: the average time between flips is about 200k years, but the last one was 780k yrs ago.....how do they come up with an avg of 200k yrs???

[fiscally_right]

Because the evidence shows that many of them have happened much more frequently than that..

[fiscally_right]

People noted that while rocks on Earth were magnetized in a disordered way, the sea bottom was magnetized in long strips. Larry Morley (whose article was regarded so speculative that journals would not publish it) and then Matthews and Vine (who managed to publish) suggested that molten rock was spreading out like a conveyer belt from volcanic cracks in the middle of the ocean floor, e.g. the one in the middle of the Atlantic (Azores islands sit on it). Or rather like 2 belts, one moving towards Europe, one towards America, carrying on them the continental plates, so that Europe and America gradually drift apart. As each belt comes out of the crack, its lava solidifes to basalt, causing it to become magnetized, and when the field reverses, its magnetization reverses too. So the bottom of the ocean records the field like the tape of a tape recorder, containing perhaps 50 million years of record.

[Landru]

"Earth's magnetic poles on verge of flipping"

Maybe that explains the behavior of the Republicans.

...since they've already flipped.

[hosepipe]

Yeah yeah and the skys falling and prez Bush will O.K and pass the biggest socialist entitlement project in 40 years...lies ,... lies all of it...

I ain't buying it...

[SubMareener]

now...just a minute...who was at the last pole flip...you know that one that took place 780,000 years ago...and did they use a Hewlett-Packard test unit then to figure this out? I think that was long before the compass was even invented. Did this article come out of "Science Fiction" comic books, or what?

The strength and orientation of the earth's magnetic field is recorded cooling lava flows all over the earth. Here is a pretty good article explaining it.

[capitan_refugio]

There is considerable debate in geophysical circles about the duration of a magnetic field reversal. In the rock record, paleomagnetic reversals are well-recorded. I have studied magnetic reversals recorded in Cenozoic igneous rocks of southern California.

The science behind the study of reversal is based on the polarity of ferro-magnetic crystals in igneous rocks. When the molten igenous rock is deposited and cools, the crystal alignment record the field polarity. As you know, eruptions are episodic, although some areas (such as Hawaii or the basalt flows in the Idaho area) can continue, off and on, in the same place for millions of years. Another place the magnetic field is well-recorded in on the ocean floor igneous basement. The sea floor spreads away from the volcanic ridges and a characteristic "stripped" pattern is observed when towing a magnetometer over a large area.

With all that said, it is also a fact that a few inches of the rock record can equate to hundreds and thousands of years, so even the sharpest magnetic contact in the rock record can represent a time interval of many years.

However, there is a school of thought in geophysical circles that believes that there can never exist "null polarity." The field must either be "normal" (the current condition by definition) or "reversed." A weak field can exist, for an indefinite duration, but never a null field.

The effect(s) of a magnetic reversal on society is another matter. I think the "dire" warnings are more about obtaining research funds than about good science. Much like the "global warming" hoax.

[Indie]

Excellent nutshell of plate tectonics theory. One of my Geology profs used to joke about the earth reversing it's magnetism. He stated that would kill us all by allowing radiation through from the sun. If that didn't do it, the sun turning into a brown darf would.
And now, a word from our sponsor: Rinso! Rinso gets clothes Rinso white! :))

[TheMole]

Although I'm generally in accord with your take on the seriousness of the magnetic pole situation, I disagree about the bar magnets. The polarized pieces of iron with N at one end and S on the other would be completely unaffected by weakenings or reversals of the earth's magnetic field. Science class could go on just as before.