North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux 346
National Geographic is reporting that the migration of Earth's magnetic pole has accelerated again and is now racing in Russia's direction at a blazing 40 miles per year. This movement began in earnest around 1904 at about 9 miles per year and has been accelerating since. "Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock. This creates a 'dynamo' that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia. 'It's too difficult to forecast,' Chulliat said. Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction."
North Pole (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia North Pole comes to YOU!
Re:North Pole (Score:4, Informative)
How are Soviet Russia jokes even funny anymore?
As a meme it's over used and lacking in hilarity. In reference to this particular story though, it could not have been better played.
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Global Warming (Score:4, Funny)
Yet another impact of "global warming". Heating the globe is melting the no-longer-solid iron center. Yikes.
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Software - a perfect analogy! (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, allow me to commend you for the perfect analogy — laws are programs, and law-making is programming... Now, to answer your questions...
Linux kernel is reviewed by thousands of people back and forth all the time. There are automatic tools verifying syntactic and even (rudimentary) semantic correctness. Thousands of "tinderboxes" test any changes for hours every days and report any deviations. The history of changes (diffs) is publicly available at all times, studied and discussed by even more people.
The two thousands pages of the bill in question has never been read in full by a single person — and when such a feat was undertaken, by the time the hero finished, the bill was already amended to bribe another Senator, etc. No automatic verification tools exist, of course — even a spell-checker would break. The entire country will be the tinderbox — production testing the below alpha-quality software. Oh, and the earlier prototypes (State-wide programs) have been failures...
And you object to somebody rejecting that software because it is too complex? What happened to coding guidelines, with each function and non-trivial block being carefully commented?
The metric is very simple — if I can't finish reading (and understanding!) it without somebody "committing" a significant change somewhere, it is too long... The "Senate version" was moved to vote after an all-nigher in the Speaker's office, for crying out loud. All those fancy promises (by the most technically advanced Administration, like, ever, dude) of legislation being posted online for days prior to vote have turned into lies. Unreadable, spaghetti-like code, no testing, and not even code review. Who could possibly object?
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You ignore the possibility that multiple collaborating people could read the bill and together verify its correctness
I do not accept this possibility. With proper quality control, there is a very careful and thorough review of the entire package before releasing it to production. This review might not go into line by line reviews, but it does go into code reviews and design reviews, verifying that everything has been thoroughly looked at. In addition, there is always the option to quickly amend missed fuck ups later. Law does not have the option to quickly amend fuck ups.
Re:Software - a perfect analogy! (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be just happy having a chance for anyone other than the writers having a chance to peak at said bill, before it is rushed to vote by people who don't know what is in the bill any more than I do.
How about a two week public review period before voting on it, so that many eyes have a chance to spot the flaws before irrevocably being instituted as law.
But hey, I don't expect anything different from a bunch of drunk, check kiting, womanizing, failures who can't run anything, but feels entitled to run everyone else's life, while exempting themselves from all the crap they expect everyone else to live by.
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Re:Global Warming (Score:4, Insightful)
O.k., Sparky, have you read the health bill? If you say you have, you are a liar.
Blindly accepting that self-interested career politicians can bring together a patchwork of often contradictory sections of proposed law and amendments that will somehow fix an arguably broken system without creating more problems than it solves is just plain idiocy. The mantra in D.C. is "Fire...Ready...Duck...Aim...Why is everyone angry at us?"
The simple fact that they rammed it through, at full speed without a fair reading and explanation is enough to make anyone wary.
This is very much like you giving up on trying to get your wife to let you fuck her anally, so you just jam it in there before she has a chance to say, "no". You got what you wanted, she's going to have deal with the pain, then, she'll deal with you. We are the wife and congress is the jackass husband.
Mods on crack again (Score:4, Insightful)
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Greetings and Salutations.
It is one thing to pass a 3000 page bill that Congress understands. However, too often today, they get a 1000 page bill a day or two before they have to vote on it. I find it difficult to believe that your average Congress-person can read and understand a 1000 page bill in two days and make a rational decision on whether passing it is good for the country as a whole, and, not just a few special interest groups.
Re:Global Warming (Score:5, Interesting)
An operating system may be too large and complicated for any one person to understand. A code of laws might also be that complicated.
A single bill, however, is most closely analogous to a patch -- or at most a patch series -- and no open source OS would accept a patch that no one claims to understand. Are you willing to run code on your computer by maintainers who accept that kind of patch? If not, why are you willing to live your entire life according to laws that are equally poorly understood and maintained?
Even beyond that, computer programs tend to be inherently less ambiguous and more deterministic than laws. These traits allow useful decomposition of programs into a hierarchy that allows a person to focus on single parts of the whole. Because laws lack those traits (and especially in the US where courts look at history and precedent), it is much harder to decompose laws into elements that one can analyze separately. This is compounded by legislatures being loath to revise even obviously outdated or buggy laws, which makes it hard to correct bugs in the law. (The Internet has many examples of dumb or silly laws; an obviously buggy one is the US federal law prohibiting compensation for bone marrow donations by classifying bone marrow as an organ.) On the whole, it is much more important for legislators to understand the whole of the law than it is for software developers to understand the whole of a program.
Voters are well-known to be rationally ignorant of their choices at the ballot box. Your argument is essentially that legislators should be rationally ignorant regarding the laws they vote on. Is that really what you want to encourage in law-makers?
We Want Vague Laws. (Score:3, Interesting)
Vagueness in law is a feature.
Laws are as specific as the Congress cares to make them. While we think a lack of precision in law is a fault, sometimes they are buggy by design. Many a times, Congress will write something that is intentionally vague, hoping the courts will either sort it out, or go the right way, or essentially make new law as circumstances merit.
As much as we talk about Congress not doing what we want, they know exactly what we want, how we vote, how we feel about issues, etc. The disconn
Re:Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can't be expected to understand the laws as a normal human, then I can't reasonably be expected to follow them either.
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Basically what QuoteMstr is saying is that Republicans are to blame for everything. Including Santa hating Linux.
Re:Global Warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
What, no mention of geomagnetic reversal? (Score:5, Informative)
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> It's moving East, not South.
Hmmm.... *BRAIN STRAIN*.... ummm... wouldn't any direction from the north pole be south?
Aaaah... This is one of these unfunny geeky jokes that I'm not quite geeky enough to get.
OK OK I fell for it... jokes on me.
I feel like such a jock now?
Re:What, no mention of geomagnetic reversal? (Score:5, Informative)
> It's moving East, not South.
Hmmm.... *BRAIN STRAIN*.... ummm... wouldn't any direction from the north pole be south?
Since magnetic North does not coincide with true North, then magnetic North can move East by simply circling true North in a counter-clockwise direction, as viewed from above the (true) North Pole.
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No, silly. It's George W Bush! Or Dick Cheney. But probably Halliburton. Maybe the coal industry??
and the south? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading/hearing in geology (or astronomy? whatever) class that every so-many-thousands of years, the magnetic poles just switch.
If i'm not just making that up, then this is the first articles of many we'll see...
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iirc, the switch seems to have been a fairly regular event, going by geological evidence, at least until recently.
seems its over due, altho i am unsure about the exactly by how much...
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and traditional compasses are nearly useless during the transition period as the north/south polarity breaks up into mini-poles, which are regional and in constant flux.
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Further to the interim multiple poles, other interesting things happen, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(astronomy) [wikipedia.org] aurora will appear over those poles, making for interesting light shows, where ever the poles should momentarily settle. The larger problem with momentary pole shift, is solar flares and the ability of radiation from those events to reach to the earth's surface depending upon which temporary pole they align with. So some kind of warning system will be required to reduce human exposure
Re:and the south? (Score:4, Interesting)
It will be interesting to see what impact it gas on migratory birds and what measure will need to be taken to alleviate that impact.
You mean by the birds? Adaptation and evolution should nail it.
If you mean by us, we could help by shooting birds that aren't traveling along the correct heading as they fly over Wasilla during the summer.
Very strong evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
The largest body of evidence for this is found in the striping of the ocean's floor. In the areas where rock material moves up from the mantle and solidifies, the molten rock aligns with the current magnetic field before it cools, and this alignment cannot be changed once the rock becomes solid. The entire ocean floor is banded with a north/south/north/south alignment pattern, implying the reversal is very consistent from a cosmological timescale perspective.
This reversal of the field occurs approximately every 800000 years, with a period of 1000-2000 years around the switch where the magnetic field is disorganized and significantly weaker than normal. This period has very big implications for lifeforms on Earth... obviously not enough to totally end life, but enough to kill lots of animals from various causes (extra solar radiation, messed up internal compass, disrupted migration patterns,etc.).
How convenient (Score:4, Insightful)
It is actually pretty cool that this happens at the time our technology is so advanced that we can have electronic compasses that simply use GPS to figure out where they are so they can point to the geographic north pole, instead of towards the magnetic one. Imagine how inconvenient it would have been for people if this had happened a view hundred years earlier; they would have to do some extra calculations to navigate their ships.
Yay for technology!
might not have GPS (Score:5, Informative)
Without a magnetic field to stop the solar wind, satellites tend to die.
Granted, GPS is military and not LEO, so it might be built a bit better than most.
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the not next to LEO was a typo, right?
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Odd, since even humans have lived through pole reversals before.
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Really? Pole reversals plural??
How is that since Homo Sapiens only first arrived 195 thousand years ago, mitochondrial eve was 150 thousand years ago, and as far as we cal tell, the last magnetic flip happened 780 000 years ago.
Re:might not have GPS (Score:4, Funny)
He's confusing it with reverse Polish notation. I remember living through that back in the 80s when I was programming FORTH on a 6502.
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while gps can tell you where you are, it cant tell where north is, unless i have misunderstood the system.
at least not as long as your standing still. Tho if you move in some direction, it can tell you on what axis the change was, and calculate north based on that.
Re:How convenient (Score:5, Informative)
GPS can determine heading in two ways.
The first way only works if the GPS receiver is moving, in which case it can calculate a course based on your current and previous positions. This course is then approximately your heading - although it can include a pretty large error due to drift (when in a ship or an airplane).
The second way only works if you have two (or more) GPS receivers a reasonable distance away from each other (say, fore and aft or port and starboard on a large enough ship, or in the tips of the wings of an airplane). Then the GPS device has two positions, and the line through them is your heading (if they're placed fore and aft) or your heading + or - a constant angle (for example, + or - 90 degrees if they're places port and starboard).
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GPS can determine heading in two ways.
false [nujournal.net]
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I appreciate your lengthy argumentation, but the link you posted is about speed determination, not heading.
It does say something about GPS trackpoints being inaccurate with an irregular error, meaning you can't calculate an accurate speed from this data. This also means you can't calculate a very accurate heading from it, which is true, but doesn't make my previous statement false. I never said anything about accuracy, just that it can be done.
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The first "problem" with your calculation is that you are assuming a 10m worst case error, while for the kind of application you describe more expensive and accurate (e.g. dual-frequency) receivers would be used. Also, SBAS would be used whenever available, making the worst case errors even smaller and less likely to occur (good DGPS systems can reach 0.1m accuracy). Not to mention that at sea one always has open sky conditions, so no canopy or multipath problems (provided the antennae are mounted in a suit
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OK, so it can do it in three ways.
It can probably also do it in a lot of additional ways, like throwing it out of the window and then wait to see if the north / south / west / east window is mentioned as broken in the police report.
Re: determining heading (Score:2)
Re:How convenient (Score:5, Informative)
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There's also the gyrocompass [wikipedia.org], which finds true north, and which doesn't depend on the earth's magnetic field. It'd work on Mars.
Re:How convenient (Score:5, Informative)
I highly doubt a handheld GPS would have an inbuilt gyrocompass. Those things need constant power to keep the gyroscope from slowing down, and if the power fails you have to recalibrate it, for which you need to know your exact heading. Which is why, on ships, they usually have their own backup power source (usually a battery) in case the main and backup power generators are down.
That, and they're pretty big and heavy. They even get their own room [navis.gr] (I also linked to this page in another post about gyrocompasses I made a few minutes ago):
Almost every naval vessel and merchant ship today carries at least one master gyrocompass, installed in its own gyro room.
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If you read any of the links that have been provided, they explain how it works. Hint: 'True North' is the 'top' of the axis that the Earth itself spins on.
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Triangulation based on the fact that the position of the satellites it's getting it's signal from are known.
On the other hand, even if we didn't have GPS, we've had gyrocompasses [wikipedia.org] for a long long time now. And they don't rely on magnetic fields whatsoever.
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Mostly correct, as long as the device has only one antenna. However a device with two can.
Assume you have a spherical cow with antennas attached to it's head (A) and tail (B).
As long as the distance between A&B is greater than twice the error margin for your GPS receiver, taking a reading from both gives you your orientation. More antenna or a greater distance between A&B equals more accuracy.
Granted, as the commenter previous to my original comment indicated, you need a large cow for this, it's not
The poles are flipping? (Score:5, Informative)
This article covers it...
http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/02/is_the_earths_magnetic_field_a.php [scienceblogs.com]
I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.
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Will make navigation sort of hard with a compass.. "North, well its sort of in that direction, kind of...."
Re:The poles are flipping? (Score:5, Informative)
2.5 All ships of 500 gross tonnage and upwards shall, [...] have:
.1 a gyro compass, or other means, to determine and display their heading by shipborne non-magnetic means [...]
.2 a gyro compass heading repeater, or other means, to supply heading information visually at the emergency steering position if provided;
.3 a gyro compass bearing repeater, or other means, to take bearings [...]
Gyrocompasses [wikipedia.org] are useful for many other reasons: they point to true north instead of magnetic north, which means you don't have to correct for magnetic declination [wikipedia.org] (the difference between true north and magnetic north) and magnetic deviation [wikipedia.org] (the difference between compass north and magnetic north, an error caused by local magnetic influences such as the steel in a ship's construction). They can also give your heading digitally, which means you can connect repeaters to it, and autopilots etc. can use its output.
From
this page [navis.gr]:
Almost every naval vessel and merchant ship today carries at least one master gyrocompass, installed in its own gyro room. A transmission system links the master gyrocompass to "repeaters." These are used on the ship for such purposes as steering, position finding, and course recording.
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Re:The poles are flipping? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of pilots use the earth's magnetic field for navigation. When flying around under visual flight rules in an analog cockpit (which make up the majority of general aviation aircraft), the magnetic compass backs up the gyro-based heading indicator. Every 15-20 minutes, the heading indicator is realigned with the compass heading when in straight and level, unaccelerated flight due to the effects of precession, making that magnetic field very important. Even in a glass cockpit, the FAA requires a backup magnetic compass in case of computer or electrical failure.
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AIUI, precise timekeeping is only needed for longitude. Can't you find your latitude and heading by looking at the north star? (The elevation of the north star above the horizon is equal to your latitude.)
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The other hemisphere? But there be dragons on them antipodes. :)
Re:The poles are flipping? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The poles are flipping? (Score:4, Funny)
This explains (Score:3, Funny)
This explains why paper notes I've left on my fridge with magnets keep sliding down. So in this conspiracy, the magnetic reversal is the blame of either the Russians or the makers of sticky note paper.
Re:This explains (Score:5, Funny)
I kinda expect that. But when they start sliding up is the time to panic.
Moving to Russia from Canada (Score:4, Funny)
As a Canadian, I feel there's only one rational response to the Russians taking our magnetic north pole (which is sort of owned by the whole of humanity and indeed the planet itself, but has been held in our trust for some time).
All out nuclear war.
And the only downside is nuclear winter! Winter! We can handle a few more months of that each year, easy. It's win-win, really!
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You only say that because you haven’t got any non-winter months in the first place! ^^
Re:Moving to Russia from Canada (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I think summer falls on a Thursday this year.
It's time for war! (Score:2)
We cannot allow a magnetic pole gap!
What about the South Pole? (Score:2, Interesting)
Please help this simpleton to understand.
North pole shifts towards Russia, how about the South pole?
It takes two to tango, right?
So, does the South pole shift as well? To where?
A sincere thank from this simpleton for anyone who can help out !
Re:What about the South Pole? (Score:5, Informative)
So, does the South pole shift as well?
Yes [aad.gov.au].
To where?
Antarctica isn't divided up into countries, so it's moving from Antarctica to Antarctica*. That's like saying it's gone from the middle of nowhere (with penguins) to also the middle of nowhere (with penguins): there's just no way of making that an attention grabbing story, despite the penguins.
*To be technical, magnetic South is near the edge of the sea ice rather than on the continent, which means it's moving from a really cold bit of ocean to another, slightly less cold bit of ocean. While that does entail more penguins, it's still not that interesting.
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Canada! (Score:2)
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Better keep an eye out for Carmen Sandiego.
North, South and Reversal (Score:5, Informative)
TFA is only about north. South is moving also, but not nearly as much. Two magnetic poles are not a rigid dipole. Maybe in the core, but at the surface they're fairly independent. Given this, it's quite possible that past geomagnetic events were not 'reversals' with north and south sliding past each other and popping out the other side. Rather north and south might wander far enough out of opposite that the Earth's external magnetic field is far off center, and/or very strong over some parts but weak over others. Conceivably they could 'collapse' by becoming too close. The magnetic field would appear to go away although the generator (and whatever drives it) is still operating. I think this makes more sense than the direct reversal in that it assumes the generator to stop operating, which I find unlikely, and start again of its own accord, which smacks of a planetary "and then a miracle occurs". The data does support this hypothesis as being at lest possible. In 2005 magnetic north of 500 miles from true north, while magnetic south was 1750 miles from true south. Either the dipole is off center, which contradicts the generator idea, or the dipole is bent.
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Current thinking is not that the generator stops and starts, nor that the poles cross over in the core or even wander along the surface until they flip. The idea is that the dipole field weakens while higher order fields intensify, so we end up with multiple poles all over. Eventually the dipole field strengthens again, with the opposite polarity.
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Satellites are of course another s
Re:North, South and Reversal (Score:5, Interesting)
Do magnetic fields get bent?
Yes actually they do.
The face of the magnetic 'sphere' that is facing the sun (and thus the solar wind and all the magnetically charged particles that come with) push against the magnetic field, so that part of the planet surface sees it much closer inward.
On the other side of the planet, it gets stretched further from the earths surface, and tapers off towards the end due to the charged particles flowing around it (Think an airplane wing, but in all three dimensions instead of two)
In fac, it is the flow of these charged particles, starting at the side of our magnetic field facing the sun, that are pushed faster, and end up following the magnetic field and in to the earths pole. This causes the auroras in the sky at the poles.
If the magnetic field ends up weakening, the field lines could even split and earth would have multiple poles wandering around the surface until two other fields met up and merged later on.
If that was to happen, the multiple poles would redirect charged particles from space down on more heavily populated areas of the planet and possibly have some health affects on us fragile humans.
The up side is you will have many auroras at night over many spots on earth.
Yeah, it's accelerating, just look at these data! (Score:2, Informative)
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Greedy Russians (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, Compass needle points to YOU!
An Inconvenient Proof (Score:5, Funny)
That's 2.3 centimeters per second. Forget global warming, it's the Earth axis that's moving and screwing everything. On Christmas day, snow was fucking MELTING over here and we're way up north. Melting snow used to be for the beginning of march.
Don't be ridiculous. We have humans now on the planet, AND the magnetic core is shifting. Coincidence? I think not.
If we plot C02 emissions alongside the rate of change of the magnetic north pole, even a 5th grade could see they're correlated.
Humans are to blame for magnetic drift.
QED.
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George Bush called. He wants credit for this one, too.
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>>George Bush called. He wants credit for this one, too. /slaps own forehead
Right! Damn, I forgot to add Bush into my proof.
Bush is ALWAYS a valid reason for any negative conclusion.
Forgetting to add Bush as a cause to any effect is worth a full letter grade deduction on a proof.
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If we plot C02 emissions alongside the rate of change of the magnetic north pole, even a 5th grade could see they're correlated.
Humans are to blame for magnetic drift.
I'll fire up my SUV to help. We need to take the Magnetic North Pole away from the vile Canadians.
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Is it really necessary to politicize even the purest scientific discoveries, and to turn even the slightest enrichment of our collective knowledge into an opportunity for a fleeting partisan jab?
Merry Christmas to you too.
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I think that you are off by a magnitude: 64*10^6mm/(pi*10^7)s ~ 2.03 mm/s
more accurately: 64*10^6/(365.25*3600*24) ~ 2.028 mm/s
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Especially since the magnetic north pole is actually near the south pole. This is why a magnetic north pole on a compass points north towards the Earth's magnetic south pole.
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It's a usrr supper weapon
Much like Borscht!
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I really can't tell whether you're kidding or not [rationalwiki.com].
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They will, like everything else,.blame the Americans for it. They might say something like all of our electronic useage has caused the magnetic drift of the North Pole to Russia. Just like they blame us for global warming, peak oil, and the New World Order that did 9/11 as an inside job, etc.
At one time the North Pole pointed to the Draco star instead of Polaris, and every few thousands of years the North Pole moves anyway before human beings even learned how to pollute or use fossil fuels or electronics, e
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I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift. I can't find the link right now to the information I found truly interesting (correlation of past poles with existing glaciers) but there's a fair amount of info out there about it. (Some people are correlating it with 2012/doomsday, so be forewarned.)
Oh good grief. TFA is about movement of the magnetic north pole. This has nothing whatever to do with the axis of rotation of the Earth, or its axial tilt. A wandering magnetic pole isn't going to cause glaciers, or probably any other climatic effect for that matter. A useless compass is about the maximum inconvenience you're likely to encounter. I suspect this "fair amount of info" about glaciation you're referring to is found on the same web sites as the 2012 apocalyptic garbage you seem to believe.
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In 2001, the North Magnetic Pole was determined by the Geological Survey of Canada to lie near Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 8118N 11048W. It was estimated to be at 8242N 11424W in 2005.
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I'm bored so I'll throw in. Please don't think I'm condescending. I'm just stuck in a hotel room.
People often get confused here. What is shifting is the magnetic pole, not the geographic pole. Both the North magnetic and South magnetic poles are shifting at some rate, the northern one moving more rapidly than the southern one. The geographic pole is not at issue here, only the magnetic one. The physical geographic north pole coincides with the rotational axis of the planet which "wobbles" by a known amount
Re:Moving east? (Score:5, Informative)
Look, educate yourself on the difference between the MAGNETIC north pole (the one defined by the magnetic field, probably caused by movement in the molten core of the earth, who's only serious influence on the earth is the direction compasses (including the ones inside a bird's head) point) and the GEOGRAPHIC north pole (the one defined by the rotation of the earth as a whole, which defines the coldest parts of the world).
The MAGNETIC north pole drifts constantly and flips occasionally (though not what one might call "regularly"). This is not accompanied by any cataclysmic extinction event, and takes place over dozens or even hundreds of years. It did not happen during the Mayan or Egyptian cultures, and unless you think they were sending probes to the mid-Atlantic ridge they were unlikely to even be aware of it much what able to predict it better then modern science (which says the field will probably begin flipping sometime in the next 10 to 200,000 years). The magnetic north pole has no influence over how cold it is in any given place on earth.
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever. If it did flip, the most obvious sign would be that the sun would rise in what we currently think of as the west, and set in what is now the east. Also, all the stuff that got flung into space as the earth stopped spinning suddenly and then started up again in the opposite direction. Or if it happened more gradually, summers and winters would gradually get more extreme until the entire world spent half of every year (as opposed to half of every day) in the sun, and the other half in the shade, at which time the trend would reverse until it came to a rest exactly as it is now but with the sun rising in what was the west and setting in what was the east. Both methods would take similarly ludicrous amounts of energy, and probably kill most large animals and plants.
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The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever.
Maybe not but it does exhibit axial precession which has a period of approximately 26,000 years [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession_(astronomy)"]
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The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever. If it did flip, the most obvious sign would be that the sun would rise in what we currently think of as the west, and set in what is now the east.
Second most obvious sign. The first most obvious sign would be the kinetic energy of the shift ripping the Earth apart. IOW, it ain't going to happen barring some uberaliens or the Hand Of God adding that amount of energy to the system. You're in Velikovsky territory with *physical* pole shifts.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The GEOGRAPHIC north pole doesn't drift appreciably, or flip - ever.
It does drift, slowly and not by very much, but the main reason it doesn't flip over time (well, change its orientation massively with respect to the rest of the solar system) is that we've got a very large satellite to stabilize us. It's been conjectured that without it, there would be no higher life on Earth because the climate would be just too nasty. Thanks, Moon!
Re:Moving east? (Score:5, Informative)
I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift.
Umm ... Are you aware that the reason it's cold at the poles has nothing to do with the earth's magnetic field, but rather the weaker intensity of sunlight at high latitudes? Were you sick on that day in third grade?
It's a particularly interesting topic if you look at the archaeological records of our past; specifically, the polar relation/geographic locations of Egyptian, Mayan, and other ancient peoples' religious/whatever sites. They seem to predict a pole shift, or at least make subtle suggestion to one occurring in the past.
The last geomagnetic reversal took place 780,000 years ago. So, bzzt, no.
Please turn in your geek card on the way out.
Re:Not good for Russia (Score:4, Informative)