Canada Loses North Pole 79
An anonymous reader submits "The Earth's roaming magnetic pole has moved out of Canada and into international waters as it heads towards Siberia. The magnetic pole has been within Canada's current boundaries for at least the past 400 years and left sometime in the past year after rapidly picking up speed in 2001. If it keeps to its current course and expected speed, it should reach Siberia by the middle of the century. There's speculation that December's tsunami causing earthquake may have been one of the factors causing the pole to move more quickly than predicted."
Re:An upcoming shift of the magnetic poles? (Score:3, Informative)
It will happen in the close future. Actually, it'll flip-flop back and forth a few times before settling down in a reverse manner.
While it's doing that, we'll be exposed to quite a bit more radiation than usual since the magnetic field is what stops most of the nasty radiation.
This may explain quite a few questions about significant mutations and the fact that they often happen quite quickly.
I do have the feeling that the magnetic field has quite an effect on the brain (intelligence in particular...the brain relies on electricity and magnetism effects this) and that the lessening of the field (what happens before a reverse) may effecting us quite a bit now.
The magnetic field North-South was quite strong when recorded civilization did some incredible things that modern technology still hasn't completely puzzled out. The field is much more weak now than it was when they did those incredible things.
Oddly enough, even with the extremely large population we have, we don't have nearly as many (proportionally) 'out of the box' thinking people that existed in previous recorded history.
Here is a good link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/ [pbs.org]
BTW: I'm much more concerned with a polarity shift or no shielding at all than a random asteroid mucking up our planet.
Re:End of the world... (Score:3, Informative)
It's actually funnier if you can speak french...
(It's so badly translated, it doesn't make sense...)
Re:An upcoming shift of the magnetic poles? (Score:5, Informative)
For what it's worth, I am a geophysicist...
If by "polar shift", you mean a magnetic reversal, then one will happen, sooner or later. The main field appears to be weaking slowly at the moment. On the other hand, the actual location of the magnetic pole is continually shifting.
Another poster gave a link to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/reversals.ht ml [pbs.org]. If you look at some of the quicktime animations of a reversal in progress, you can see what happens to the field at the Earth's surface. The dominant feature of the current field is a dipole field - which is why the field can be nicely approximated to a bar magnet. As a reversal takes place, the dipole component of the field falls in strength, and quadrapole and then octopole features start to dominate - meaning there won't be an actual pair of poles.
The original poster said;
This is mentioned in the original article. Although not impossible, I would tend to think it's pretty unlikely (but my speciality is seismology now, not geomagnetism). Big subduction zone earthquakes, which produce a significant vertical movement of mass, do affect the earth's moment of inertia. This leads to (small) changes in rotation speed and the orientation of the rotation pole. This is because the moment of inertia is dependant on the mass distribtion of the entire earth.
The magnetic field is produced in the liquid outer core. It's in constant motion. There's also a difference in the net rotation of the core relative to the rest of the earth, which causes a continual westward drift of the field. This means the poles are always moving. Ships have been measuring the declination between geographic and magnetic north for centuries - the movement of the magnetic pole isn't uniform.