Global Warming and Magnetic switch

[ATLien_0]

I saw this article on aol today http://reference.aol.com/globalwarming/tim...327120109990001

basically its saying that global warming is the real deal and such. But If I recall the earth also goes through phases where the magnetic polar fields will switch. In order for this to happen the atmosphere needs to weaken. Now from what I know we are long overdue for this to happen maybe as much as 900 years, Could this be what it happening a combo of global warming the the fields weakening. This could be what happended to Mars

[mrchetsteadman]

Haha! I am happy this is happening in a certain aspect. A while back there was a thread saying that global warming is real and is happening faster than expected. The Neowin trolls said that tin foil hatters watch too much TV. Now that it is actually happening, I wonder what they will say.

And about the magnetic poles switching, that wont happen till 2012. Read up on the Mayan prophecies, looks like they are comming true.

[Boffa Jones Veteran]

Thread Tentatively Moved to Science Section from RWI

[ATLien_0]

Well if they do swich we are screwed

[thermal+paste]

mayan prophecies are a joke

cmon now

[ATLien_0]

im not talking about the prophecy, im talking straight science, i mean i did some research and it adds up, yes we have global warming, but the magnetic fields are also weakening

[MonkeyClaw Veteran]

How are we screwed if magnetic polarity switches? All that will happen is that compasses will point in the wrong direction, simple as that. Buildings will still be standing, electricity will work so we can all talk about it on here, lol, and there will still be food on the table.

[timmmay]

i'd put my money on all the planes losing navigation though :D

[ATLien_0]

actually from what ive read when the magnetic fields switch that will be when the atmosphere is the weakest, so if the atmosphere weakens what else could happend.

[MonkeyClaw Veteran]

Well when we studied this in Physics, nothing at all was mentioned about the atmosphere. And why would that matter? I mean what would the weakening of the atmosphere have to do with the reversal of the magnetic poles. That doesn't really make sense because the atmosphere is affected by the magnetic field not the other way around. But to be fair, I will read a bit more into it ;)

[ATLien_0]

yea i am reading more on it, i got pretty interested in the topic today, thinking of doing a research paper for school on it now

[MonkeyClaw Veteran]

We had a really good discussion about it in my AP Physics class, and everyone was like freaked out. Our teacher assured us and went into depth about how it will really only affect compasses and other devices that rely on the polarity of the Earth's natural magnetic field and in those cases it is just a simple that magnetic north would be physical north instead of physical south as it stands right now.

[Hum]

:rolleyes: Hmm ... If the magnetic poles have shifted many times in the past, then how are we 'screwed' ? Evidently humans have survived just fine, and at the present time there are over 6 billion people -- even if 80% were somehow wiped out, that would leave a billion-plus to regenerate the numbers rather quickly.

And, presumably, we are better educated and have more technical knowledge to continue on, than did our very ancient ancestors .... or do we ?

[sundayx Veteran]

let me call john titor

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

well, there's a north [seeking] pole at the south pole and a south [seeking] pole at the north pole.... so them switching will put it in the right places :rofl:

Anyways, either way, there's nothing we can do about it, we should just enjoy the ride.

[Laurë Veteran]

Oh noes we're all going to die.

I remember a few years ago everyone was crapping their load over the millenium bug and Nostrodamus' predictions of doom and death. But we're still here.

[dreamz Veteran]

here is some information:

Fatal attraction

Earth's magnetic field is showing strong signs that the poles are due to switch over. It could be the end of the world as we know it, writes Paul Simons

Thursday July 4, 2002

The Guardian

The Earth could be about to turn upside down. The planet's magnetic field is showing signs of wanting to make a gigantic somersault, so that magnetic north heads towards Antarctica, and magnetic south goes north. Compasses will point the wrong way, and migrating birds, fish and turtles are going to be very confused.

Just when this will happen, how long it will take and what the consequences will be, is difficult to fathom. What is not in doubt, though, is that it will happen. About every half a million years or so, the Earth's magnetic field flips upside down.

The story begins in 1600, when Sir William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, suggested that the Earth was a giant magnet. At the magnetic poles, a compass needle would stand up and point straight down into the Earth. And he was right, up to a point. The magnetic poles are where all the lines of force of Earth's magnetic field are drawn together. It does not coincide with the geographic poles, the axis on which the Earth spins, but it is close.

Yet the Earth is not a solid magnet. For one thing, its magnetic poles are constantly drifting around. At present, magnetic north is heading out of Canadian territory into the Arctic Ocean at about 10 miles per year. Also, a bar magnet quickly loses its power, yet the Earth's magnetic field has been around for billions of years, so something is regenerating it. This is why Einstein remarked that the origin of the Earth's magnetic field was one of the greatest mysteries of physics.

Today, we think that magnetic power comes from the Earth's hot outer shell of molten iron sloshing around a solid inner core. As this subterranean ocean of liquid metal slowly whirls around, it behaves like a dynamo generating electrical currents and magnetic fields. Just like the flickering light on a bicycle powered by a dynamo, the Earth's currents are a little erratic, and so the magnetic field at the surface of the Earth fluctuates.

We know the magnetic polarity goes topsy-turvy from rocks on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Along the middle of the Atlantic runs a gigantic crack from which lava oozes. As the lava solidifies into rock, it records the Earth's magnetic polarity at the time. These records show that we are due for another flip about now. But the Earth does not keep a regular rhythm, so no one could make a prediction based on past performance alone. There is, however, more convincing proof that we are heading for a tumble. Each time the magnetic field heads for a reversal, it grows weaker over several thousand years until it almost disappears. Then it switches and starts up again with renewed vigour.

Magnetism trapped in ancient pottery shows that over the past 4,000 years, the magnetic field has weakened by more than 50%. This past century, the strength has dropped by 5%. At this rate, the field might disappear in the next few hundred or thousand years. Another warning sign of an imminent flip has come recently from satellite measurements of the Earth's magnetic field.

A team led by Gauthier Hulot, of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, has spotted patches of reversed magnetism concentrated in two places just underneath the Earth's outer mantle. In the largest patch, beneath the southern tip of Africa, the magnetic field is pointing towards the centre of the Earth, instead of outwards. The other patch is near the north pole.

Some experts have stuck their necks out to predict that we can expect the next reversal some time in the next 2,000 years. The process would probably then take anything between 100 and a few thousand years - not even a blink in the history of Earth. We can only guess what life would be like during that reversal. Anyone trying to navigate with a magnetic compass is going to have a tough time, but what is going to happen to all those birds, fish and other animals that migrate vast distances using their own internal magnetic compass? Will they have time to re-draw their magnetic maps and get new bearings?

Even more creatures such as bees and some bacteria use a sense of magnetism for finding their way around their local territories, for a north/south or up/down axis. The Earth's magnetic field also stretches several hundred miles into space and protects us from the sun's charged particles and cosmic rays by focusing them towards the poles. This is where they appear as the northern and southern lights as they excite gases in the atmosphere. As the magnetic poles migrate across the world, those night lights are going to light up some very strange places where they have never been seen before. During a field reversal, this protective magnetic shield is going to be weak and might even disappear for a century or more. That might drastically affect the weather. There is a growing body of evidence that the sun's highly charged particles batter the upper atmosphere so hard that some of the assault filters down into the atmosphere around us, influencing the wind, atmospheric pressure and temperature.

Without our magnetic shield, those solar particles might create havoc with the weather. That cosmic radiation blasting the Earth's surface could cause genetic mutations and cancers. Yet when palaeontologists scoured the fossil records looking for signs of mass extinctions or bursts of evolution during previous magnetic field flips, they found nothing. Living organisms seem to have survived intact. But what will happen next time?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,...,748510,00.html

and another article, more recent:

Solar wind to shield Earth during pole flip

* 09:30 15 May 2004

Hollywood now has one less disaster scenario to worry about. The Earth, it seems, will be safe when its magnetic field falters during the next reversal of its magnetic poles.

A new model of the way the Earth interacts with the solar wind indicates that a replacement field will form in the upper atmosphere during the switch.

Scientists had previously thought that the planet would be left without a protective shield to stop lethal radiation from space reaching the surface.

The strength of the Earth's magnetic field is known to drop during "magnetic reversals", when the north and south poles swap places. Records of the field direction, frozen into sediments laid down on the seabed, show that the magnetic field has reversed hundreds of times in the past 400 million years.

In normal circumstances, the magnetic field protects the Earth's surface from dangerous high-energy particles, including particles from the sun and cosmic rays from deep space.

But as the field switches polarity, it can drop to below 10 per cent of its normal strength for thousands of years. Such a weakened field would allow lethal radiation to reach the Earth's surface, with potentially disastrous consequences for the atmosphere, the climate and particularly for life.

Opportune moment

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.

The news comes at an opportune moment. The Earth's magnetic field is showing worrying signs that it is about to reverse again. Not only has the magnetic north pole wandered by 1100 kilometres in the past 200 years, but its strength is dropping at a rate of 5 per cent a century.

"This is the fastest decrease since the last reversal 730,000 years ago," Lesch says.

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

[MonkeyClaw Veteran]

Well I dunno about that dreamz, the first quoted article got the poles wrong, lol. Right now they are about to reverse so that magnetic north is physical north and magnetic south is physical south.

But that second article is rather interesting, its just cool how nature sort of saves itself. I really do not think that when it switches anyone will notice besides people looking out for it or perhaps lost hikers...