Earth's Magnetic Pole Is Wandering, Lurching Toward Siberia

[Zorro]

Earth's north magnetic pole is on the move, unpredictably lurching away from the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia. It's wandered so much, that the current representation of the entire globe's magnetic field, just updated in 2015, is now out of date. And so, geologists have come up with a new model.

This updated model, called the World Magnetic Model, was supposed to be published Jan. 15, but it's now been delayed to Jan. 30, on account of the government shutdown.

Once it's made public, the new model will inform a wide array of navigation, including those directing airplanes and ships to people checking Google Maps on their smart devices.

The World Magnetic Model is one of a handful of models — another is called the International Geomagnetic Reference Field — that track so-called declination, or the difference between true, or geographic, north (that is, the North Pole) and magnetic north (the point where your compass needle points). Knowing that declination for points across the globe allows one to convert between a magnetic bearing and a true bearing, according to a report on the 2015 model. In that way, ships, aircraft, antennas, drilling equipment and other devices can be oriented.

https://www.livescience.com/64486-earth-magnetic-pole-moving.html

[Boxerfan]

1. Putin!!!!

Will he stop at nothing....


Sad thing is would you put it past him?.


On a reality note-I have a old compass & the colors that used to match for the N and S are opposite now.

[exboyfil]

2. Is it getting ready to flip again?

Will have impact on some migrating animals. The last time was 72 million years ago. That was 7 million years of so before the K-T event which basically reset animal life.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. So far, what it's done is get closer to the geographical pole than before

I don't know if anyone's figured out a way of determining accurately exactly where it was before actual measurements started, but unless they have, it doesn't seem reasonable to think that going closer to the geographical pole is an indication of something unusual.

And the last time it flipped was about 800,000 years ago, not 72 million:

Even so, the current strength of the magnetic field is not particularly low in terms of the range of values it has had over the last 50,000 years and it is nearly 800,000 years since the last reversal. Also, bearing in mind what we said about 'excursions' above, and knowing what we do about the properties of mathematical models of the magnetic field, it is far from clear we can easily extrapolate to 1500 years hence.

http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/reversals.html

[SidDithers]

4. The last reversal wasn't 72 million years ago...

Reversals have happened regularly and randomly throughout history.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-poleReversal.html

Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal. A reversal happens over hundreds or thousands of years, and it is not exactly a clean back flip. Magnetic fields morph and push and pull at one another, with multiple poles emerging at odd latitudes throughout the process. Scientists estimate reversals have happened at least hundreds of times over the past three billion years. And while reversals have happened more frequently in "recent" years, when dinosaurs walked Earth a reversal was more likely to happen only about every one million years.

Sid

[Blue_true]

5. That is about what I was about to input. The flip is said to be way overdue.

One question. What is the consequence of a magnetic pole flip to life on earth, except screwing up navigation?

Also, how long does a flip take to complete? I read that was millions of years.