Earth's Magnetic North Pole Changes Time Zones, Just Keeps Drifting (forbes.com) 108
pgmrdlm tipped us off to an unprecedented scientific phenomenon. Forbes writes:
Earth's magnetic north pole has been moving East at an unusually fast pace, heading from the Canadian Arctic toward Russia. The rapid change of the magnetic poles has caused concern over navigation, GPS systems, military operations, etc. The northern magnetic pole has been drifting toward Russia at a speed of 34 miles per year (55 kilometers per year) but has slowed recently to 25 miles per year (40 kilometers per year).
Popular Mechanics writes: The magnetic poles have drifted and entirely changed places dozens of times in Earth's history, but this time it seems to be happening very fast, and within a shorter overall time interval than it did in prehistory... [S]witches happened thousands or millions of years apart and took thousands of years for the poles to physically move enough to switch. This is the first time scientists are observing drifting magnetic field activity in real time and measuring the rate of change as well.
Popular Mechanics writes: The magnetic poles have drifted and entirely changed places dozens of times in Earth's history, but this time it seems to be happening very fast, and within a shorter overall time interval than it did in prehistory... [S]witches happened thousands or millions of years apart and took thousands of years for the poles to physically move enough to switch. This is the first time scientists are observing drifting magnetic field activity in real time and measuring the rate of change as well.
Changed time zones! (Score:2)
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Serious people are VERY WORRIED [americanthinker.com] about changes in our Sun's electro-magnetic behavior.
Serious people should chill out a little and realize that there is absolutely no point in worrying about something you have zero control over. It's still going to happen if and when it does and having worried about it only means you'll be in less shape to deal with it when it does.
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Serious people are VERY WORRIED about changes in our Sun's electro-magnetic behavior.
Yes, and it's pointless because there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
If the Sun burps in our direction, we're all terminally screwed. The Earth will end up as a dirty glass marble after it re-solidifies and that'll be that.
I'd rather worry about something I can change or avoid.
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Serious people are VERY WORRIED about changes in our Sun's electro-magnetic behavior.
Yes, and it's pointless because there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Nonsense. If you can predict the timing and the results, you can mitigate the worst effects of many events. Not all, certainly. As you say, a massive solar flare in our direction could destroy all life on Earth, but we have strong evidence that those sorts of events are extremely rare. But this movement of the pole, and even reversal, isn't all that rare, and could well have a serious impact on human civilization. It's a very good idea for us to work to understand the mechanisms and effects, so we can
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It's a very good idea for us to work to understand the mechanisms and effects, so we can figure out what problems it might create and make plans to mitigate those problems.
I don't disagree. You're welcome to spend as much time as you like worrying and planning how to 'mitigate' an Earth-destroying event.
Also let us know when you figure out a way to lock the North pole in place, stop tectonic drift, or keep that pesky Sun from cooking us to a cinder. Next, could you make it rain more in the Sahara and less in Seattle? And a pony, I want a pony too.
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Serious people are VERY WORRIED about changes in our Sun's electro-magnetic behavior.
"Only Dr Hans Zarkov, formerly at NASA, has provided any explanation... This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm."
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Simple solution: move the magnetic north pole to the geographic north pole. Then it would be in all time zones at the same time!
Re:Changed time zones! (Score:5, Funny)
Simple solution: move the magnetic north pole to the geographic north pole.
Now we need to start a fake news article about Russias new uber powerful supervillian electromagnet that they are using to steal our magnetic north pole.
We could probably get millions of dollars as military contractors to provide a solution to get our rightfully owned pole back!
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We'll spread the rumor that they're the runs behind HAARP.
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Now I'm picturing a giant horseshoe magnet (painted red, of course) just outside of Moscow, windings smoking slightly, with a few Ladas stuck to the poles...
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There are more timezones than the integer ones. For example there is a GMT+5 1/2 timezone that cannot be visited at the north pole (Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal etc).
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Since GPS relies on clocks and orbital mechanics, it's not obvious why a shifting magnetic pole would have the slightest impact on it.
Obviously, more Russian interference ... (Score:2)
Earth's magnetic north pole has been moving East at an unusually fast pace, heading from the Canadian Arctic toward Russia.
This explains their massive electromagnet installation above the Arctic Circle.
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Since the story originated in Forbes, I guess they can be forgiven for getting the science wrong. Even crossing the Prime Meridian doesn't make the direction of travel switch to easterly.
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A crisis? (Score:2)
I understand some runways have had to be re-numbered due to magnetic pole drift.
But if the poles actually flipped wouldn't that scramble a lot of navigation equipment that relies on magnetic pole orientation? Many car GPS I have seen uses a compass input to guess which way the car is pointing when it is sitting still.
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I for one am looking forward to living in South America.
Okay, now I understand Trump's, very forward-thinking, reasoning for renaming NAFTA ... :-)
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But if the poles actually flipped wouldn't that scramble a lot of navigation equipment that relies on magnetic pole orientation?
Never mind that, there will be a more devastating crisis:
Our toilets will start flushing in the wrong direction, like they do in Australia!
And the Australians will not be prepared to see their toilets flushing in the right direction.
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Renumbering runways is relatively routine. Magnetic North has always drifted - I recall Heathrow's being renumbered in - er, was it the late 70s? - though as they're rounded to the nearest ten degrees there's plenty of time for the paint to dry.
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Renumbering runways is becoming more common now. It's a very expensive proposition also. Besides the time and expense to renumber a busy runway, verything has to be republished as well. I read that there is debate over whether to continue using compass bearings for the runways, or to switch everything to just use true bearings since all commercial aircraft have GPS instrumentation and that could become the basis for course plotting. However compass use is such an integrated part of aviation, and general a
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Most of the time a commercial airliner is landing, it is tilted sideways because of wind. That means the true bearing of the nose is more or less never the true magnetic nor the true geographic bearing. However as runways usually are parallel, and not randomly placed of the field, it does not really matter how good your "compass reading" matches, it is unlikely that there is another option in a 30Â or 45Â off direction.
Re:A crisis? (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're currently still the world leaders in skin cancer and no one is sure why
What do you mean no one is sure why? How about a country where the UV index is 10 almost year around, where the population isn't black or latino, and where the most beautiful beaches in the world entice people to lie in the sun and roast themselves as a national pastime. That and our general healthcare is excellent which leads to a large and rapid diagnosis rate so there's an element of reporting error compared to the many other countries in our latitude.
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More UVB/UVC because there the ozone layer is damaged, and: during Australian summer, the earth is at its closed distance to the sun (makes less than 1% difference, though).
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Also, we have good grounds to think (next paragraph) that a magnetic field reversal does not happen instantaneously, but that over a period of a century or several the field gets weaker, then gets stronger in the opposite direction. And around the zero field perio
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Many car GPS I have seen uses a compass input to guess which way the car is pointing when it is sitting still.
It's possible to account for changing magnetic declination, though I don't know if e.g. Android actually does this except with new versions...
'Very Fast' (Score:2)
... in geological terms, still thousands of years, well outside of human timescales.
For fun, a snail moves at about 0.03 miles per hour, or 260 miles per year, 10 times faster than the poles are moving.
Re:'Very Fast' (Score:5, Informative)
In geological terms, 34 miles per year is huge. For reference, continental drift is only about 1 inch per year.
At 34 miles per year, that's 3400 miles every 100 years which, if it moved in a straight line, would put it at
the equator in 183 years and would likely cause major problems way before then.
Thank you (Score:2)
I will adjust the time zone setting in my compass now.
Re: Damn Russians (Score:2)
Tame Trump?
Become Hillary Clinton?
Just in time for Christmas (Score:5, Funny)
Fox News Headline:
"Russians Steal North Pole"
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Fox News Headline: "Russians Steal North Pole"
Don't give them ideas...
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RUSSIA TODAY headline "north pole now owned by Russia"
The most likely culprit (Score:1)
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That's no more idiotic than some of the other "plans".
Re: The most likely culprit (Score:2)
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If you published that and claimed 'Scientists say', doomers would eat it up and regurgitate the nonsense all over the world while wagging fingers at everyone else about 'something something save the magnets you hater'.
For even more effect have the headline say 'Scientists say X is happening TWICE as fast as ever before in history' well after cutting off any inconvenient portions of historical record of course.
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overheating core? (Score:1)
Either global warming is having an effect on Earth's core or it's a damn fine coincidence that it's happening just as we started turning up the heat. I know we're due for a polar switch but it seems like we triggered it. Just a hypothesis for now but eventually we'll know the truth when we have planets to experiment with. I'm sure global warming will be an important case study in geoengineering.
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LOL. The funny part is you posted this drivel directly below a comment that said the same thing tongue-in-cheek. Too stupid.
Re: overheating core? (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you say global warming is too small of a change to have any effect on the planet?
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I want you to tell us that you think it is possible that AGW is causing the magnetic field to drift. That way we can all laugh at you.
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I want you to tell us that you think it is possible that AGW is causing the magnetic field to drift.
HA! We fooled ya! AGW is causing the axis [nasa.gov] to drift. Now watch the magic!
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I want you to tell us that you think it is possible that AGW is causing the magnetic field to drift. That way we can all laugh at you.
I think it's possible, thought I think the probability is very small. The mechanism would likely be the redistribution of surface mass: water. As another commenter pointed out, we suspect that this redistribution of water is causing the spin axis to change. That could in turn change the currents in the core.
As I said, I think it's unlikely, but it's not completely impossible. If you know of some reason that alterations to the spin could not induce changes in the interior currents that generate the mag
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You cannot shift the burden of proof. If you think something, it's incumbent upon *you* to prove it.
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You cannot shift the burden of proof. If you think something, it's incumbent upon *you* to prove it.
My claim is that it's conceivable, and I offered a clear mechanism with no obvious weaknesses. That's sufficient to prove my claim, unless someone else can come up with some reason my mechanism either (a) isn't actually occurring (see this [nasa.gov]) or (b) can't affect the magnetic field, which we know is created by currents in the metallic core, which in turn seem very likely to be affected by changes in the axis of rotation.
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Uh, no. Not even close to sufficient.
My claim is that it's conceivable, and I offered such a conception. Quod erat demonstrandum. You obviously couldn't find any holes in it, and so chose instead to question my profession and/or education, i.e. ad hominem.
I'm going out on a limb and assuming you're not actually a scientist?
My degrees are in mathematics and computer science. Make of that what you will.
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It could also be the other way around. The moving poles will have an effect on incoming radiation and could just as easily be another independent and natural climate variable with feedbacks modelers had not even considered.
I know a lot of people like to think "science" knows exactly how the climate works. Myself I think it would be naive to discount the likelihood of significant unknown unknowns.
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The earth climate is mostly defined by sunlight. ...
Not by "radiation". The magnet field is not shielding sunlight, it shields from charged atomic particles
I'm really surprized how extremely dumb people are in this thread. No worries, you are not the only one.
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Cosmic "radiation" affects the formation of aerosols in the atmosphere.
Some scientists think it is irrelevant.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.... [wiley.com]
Others think it is more important.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.... [wiley.com]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
I would not bet any money on either of them given current state of knowledge. I'm really surprized how extremely dumb people are in this thread too.
Re: overheating core? (Score:2)
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The light blowing the moment you flick the switch isn't superstition,
You explained why it happens. I don't disagree - this is a well known phenomenon. However the superstition part is believing it has some sort of significance in the person's life. That has nothing to do with the mechanism you pointed out.
Article isn't quite accurate (Score:4, Informative)
(from link at bottom of the summary)
Do you know planets spinning is also why they're roughly spherical?
Ehm.. NO. It's gravity. If a celestial body is small, its gravitational force is weak. Thus it can include structures that give it a very irregular shape. As it grows bigger so does the gravitational force. Too high a mountain & it will collapse, the material erodes and carries off into surrounding area, or it'll push & sink into the main body (especially if interior is liquid like on earth). Too deep a depression, and material from surrounding area or the body's interior will fill it in.
Net result is a limit to how much the height of surface structures can deviate from a sphere. The bigger the body, the more it will have to look like a perfect sphere. Spinning makes for the flattened sphere aka ellipsoid.
Make it sound more scary, put it in hours (Score:2)
It's 6m or 20ft per hour!
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Get a law passed that magnetic north is true north (Score:2)
That always works, right? But it's the law!
Plot for the next Bond film? (Score:1)
Handwaving (Score:2)
I get tired of this alarmist crap about how everything is going off the rails, as if the world runs by the clockwork mechanisms we wish it did. From Wikipedia:
Reversal occurrences are statistically random. There have been 183 reversals over the last 83 million years. The latest, the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago
a 2019 paper estimated that the most recent reversal, 780,000 years ago, lasted 22,000 years
Okay, so that directly contradicts Popular Mechanics.
And...
Studies of 15-million-year-old lava flows on Steens Mountain, Oregon, indicate that the Earth's magnetic field is capable of shifting at a rate of up to 6 degrees per day.
That's 415 miles in a single day that the field has changed in the past.
Thank God no one has been able to pin any causes of this on humans or we'd never hear the end of it (OR.... maybe the electromagnetic radiation from all our cell phones combined is canceling out the earths magnetic field!
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Oh, I'll have to read that one. New to me.
Open access, paper here [sciencemag.org]. Off to read.
Just because I am nosy... (Score:1)
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Runway numbers are Changing! (Score:1)
what is east of Canada? (Score:2)
This first had me confused, since moving East from Canada would typically make me think Greenland, and eventually Europe. But of course most of us grow up with the Mercator projection maps as the basic learning tool.
So instead I looked other projections often used for maps of the polar regions, such as Orthographic Projection [winwaed.com].
Thing is, even with a map of the polar regions, I don't see how moving East from Canada
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Why don'z you simply look on a map? .... you did, and did not grasp it.
Oh
Hint: there is a 0 meridian. Things east of that are ... well east.
And Canada is west.
Or look at it that way: buy a globe, preferred one made from wood. Cut it into two pieces along the 0 and 180 meridian.
The piece with Canada on it, is west, the other one east.
No idea why no one on /. grasps that.
Damn Russians... (Score:2)
Hardly (Score:2)
"The rapid change of the magnetic poles has caused concern over navigation, GPS systems, military operations, etc."
The only people relying on the magnetic North-Pole nowadays are boy scouts.
Re: Hardly (Score:2)
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You addressed the wrong issue.
GPS does not rely on the magnetic north pole ... it does not matter where it goes ...
Global Warming/Climate Change (Score:2)
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No. Please don't be one of those alarmists who knows little science but only understands sensationalist popular articles by journalists who studied basket weaving in college.
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another Russian aggression (Score:1)
That IS fast (Score:2)
34 miles per year is about 20 feet 5 3/4 inches per hour. About 10 1/4 inches per minute, or an inch in a tad under 6 seconds. About the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a clock about 6 1/2 feet in diameter or the second hand on one 3 1/4 inches across.
You could see motion that fast. (If it was the motion of something visible, of course.)
Time Zone? Navigation? Military ops? Come on. (Score:2)
Climate Change! Create a gov group to help fix it! (Score:1)
This is a great example of the whole messed up global warming/climate change debate.
Yes, the climate/globe changes. We know this! 99.9% of the people acknowledge it.
The debate is really over how much we want power complexes (government political systems) trying to mandate/control things because of it.