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Magnetic Pole Shift


??

What is.... your IQ?

Polar_Wander_1965reduced.gif
 
Not completely. I think Einstein called this one of the great scientific mysteries of Earth. In the middle of the oceans where continents are moving apart, there are lines, I forget what they are called, where magma rises and new ocean floor is created. Trace amounts of magnetic particles in the rock align with the poles and then when the rock cools and hardens, this magnetic charge is locked in. But there are stripes of polarity in this rock indicating the poles flip every so often, and we don't know why. Best guess is some fluid dynamics phenomenon in the motion of the liquid core. Some kind of rotation that has two quasi-stable modes. Anyway, when I was younger, people used to freak out about what would happen when the poles flip. If the magnetic field weakened to zero and then came back, but flipped, it would be absolutely disastrous. Radiation would fry everything. But it's happened many times over the period where we have a fossil record and life wasn't wiped out, so now think the field gets messy with regions of positive and negative charge breaking up and moving north/south in a complicated, ugly way - kind of like a lava lamp. This would still be real trouble, there would be an increase in harmful radiation impacting living things and communication signals, but nothing like what would happen if it went away completely for a bit. Should you worry about it more or less than the supervolcano in Yellostone or the earthquake that has to hit CA someday? I don't know.
 
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...Anyway, when I was younger, people used to freak out about what would happen when the poles flip. If the magnetic field weakened to zero and then came back, but flipped, it would be absolutely disastrous. Radiation would fry everything. But it's happened many times over the period where we have a fossil record and life wasn't wiped out, so now think the field gets messy with regions of positive and negative charge breaking up and moving north/south in a complicated, ugly way - kind of like a lava lamp. This would still be real trouble, there would be an increase in harmful radiation impacting living things and communication signals, but nothing like what would happen if it went away completely for a bit. Should you worry about it more or less than the supervolcano in Yellostone or the earthquake that has to hit CA someday? I don't know.

yeah, i also used to worry about this when i first read about it, then later read that the changes in polarity never lined up with mass extinctions, so in the event the magnetic field weakened or stopped, it was brief enough that the increase in radiation didn't kill everything. I'll stock extra sunscreen.

apparently, all scientists agree on this fact, even the 3% that are too stupid to understand climate change is man-made.
 
Agree Michchamp Man's impact on climate change is about 3% sounds about right.
 
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