Earth's magnetic poles could flip sooner than originally expected. Credit: UC Berkeley
Posted on 10/18/2014 7:44:08 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A magnetic field shift is old news. Around 800,000 years ago, magnetic north hovered over Antarctica and reindeer lived in magnetic south. The poles have flipped several times throughout Earth's history. Scientists have estimated that a flip cycle starts with the magnetic field weakening over the span of a few thousand years, then the poles flip and the field springs back up to full strength again. However, a new study shows that the last time the Earth's poles flipped, it only took 100 years for the reversal to happen.
The Earth's magnetic field is in a weakening stage right now. Data collected this summer by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite suggests the field is weakening 10 times faster than scientists originally thought. They predicted a flip could come within the next couple thousand years. It turns out that might be a very liberal estimate, scientists now say...
While a pole flip could cause a few technical issues, there's no need to panic. Scientists have combed the geological timeline for any evidence of catastrophes that might be related to a magnetic flip. They haven't found any.
The only havoc that a reversal would wreak is interference in the global electric grid.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
So will this affect global warming? Will liberals lecture us that we have to panic and do drastic things to change our lives, due to this polar shift?????
Sorry to be so cynical, but, get the feeling that somebody somewhere will use this to make a political statement................
Maybe it will lead to more effort made to “harden” the electrical grid.
Man, is this going to mess up the weird gal who lives inside my Garmin!
Just wait until she stars talking backwards.
We don’t have 800k years of climate data to know what this does to the climate, since the impact of carbon is so low, this could completely invalidate all of the statistical signal in the models.
Only?
“Earth’s magnetic poles could flip sooner than originally expected”
Could being the key word here. Yellowstone could go off. The Cascadia Subduction Zone could cut loose. Some giant asteroid could hit us. Some black hole could swallow us. I’m not losing any sleep over any of the above.
The world will end
This I know
For Art Bell has
Told me so.
Who will be the first to blame Bush?
Life just isn’t safe anymore.
It had better hurry up.
I smell a government grant in the making.
Or not.
Will west and east stay the same?
Good one! In reality, GPS systems are based on True North and Mag North/Headings are derived.
“Will liberals lecture us that we have to panic and do drastic things to change our lives, due to this polar shift?????”
YES...we have to immediately reverse the polarity in our A/C electrical systems and then start plugging our appliance plugs in oppositely. If your appliances have the type of prongs where one blade is wider than the other...you’ll have to grind down the wider blade. You’ll probably also have to run your ceiling fan in reverse because your fan will run backwards.
During the magnetic flip, will the earth lose it’s gravitational pull? Will people begin to float up into the sky?
Tin hats will say ‘yes’.
But what doesn’t get discussed publicly is what happens during those thousand years’ of weakening magnetic field.
We may or may not live to see it, but you can bet the additional cosmic radiation reaching earth will play havoc on the biosphere, that includes the dominant species (in our case, the most arrogant species as well).
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