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Earth’s Magnetic Field is Acting up and Geologists Don’t Know Why

posted by martyb on Sunday January 13 2019, @02:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the Magnetic-north!=north-pole dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move.

On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.

The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. “The error is increasing all the time,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:07PM (10 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:07PM (#785912) Homepage
    I did see somewhere vaguely respectable that some geologists thought that the occasional pole flip was possibly to be upon us soon. Maybe this instability is a precursor to that. I'm not sure how much hard science, rather than things just being believable, there is behind the models people currently have - it's really not a simple subject at all. Even Einstein rejected the model that's currently favoured when he was told of it, it's pretty wacky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWHxmJf6U3M
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @03:26PM (#785917)

    I recall seeing something similar. The geologic record showing that the poles swap with some previously consistent frequency every X centuries or so. But if I’m remembering correctly, we were something like 400 years overdue for a swap today.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:03PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:03PM (#785948) Journal

      The timing isn't all that consistent or regular. There's an average, but there's a lot of variation. There's also a lot of variation in how rapidly they flip, but that's even more difficult to pin down.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:06PM (7 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:06PM (#785950)

    As I recall we also have an additional pole forming in the Indian Ocean, along with several other anomalies suggesting that the Earth's magnetic field is on the verge of collapsing into a chaotic mess as the poles prepare to flip. At least by geological timescales anyway - we might remain on the verge for millenia before it happens.

    Might be a good time to stock up on sunscreen - when the magnetosphere collapses, the ozone layer will likely be stripped way down by the solar wind in short order.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:29PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:29PM (#785995)

      Until recently sunscreen selectively blocked only the wavelengths that caused sunburn, but not skin cancer. Since people's bodies werent able to warn them they were getting dangerous amounts of exposure, people got too much sun with too little tan. So skin cancer rates have skyrocketed. It is almost exactly like the obesity epidemic caused by advocating low-fat (ie, high carb) diets. So watch out.

      In the U.S. in 1935, one’s estimated lifetime risk of melanoma was 1 in 1,500 [4]. In the U.S. in the year 2000, the lifetime risk of melanoma was estimated at 1 in 75 persons. In Australia, the lifetime risk has been estimated at 1 in 25 [4]. These stark numbers have placed melanoma in the category of an “epidemic.”

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20541680 [nih.gov]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @07:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @07:44AM (#786344)

        Until recently sunscreen selectively blocked only the wavelengths that caused sunburn, but not skin cancer.

        citation required

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 13 2019, @09:12PM (4 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday January 13 2019, @09:12PM (#786015) Homepage
      I recommend latitudes starting with a '6', but am too lazy to do the trig that demonstrates by how much it's an improvement.
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      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 14 2019, @01:02AM (1 child)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday January 14 2019, @01:02AM (#786160) Journal

        It varies as the sine of the latitude, IIRC. So sin(66).

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        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday January 14 2019, @09:19AM

          by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Monday January 14 2019, @09:19AM (#786378) Homepage
          That's the insolation (or anything else incoming from the sun) per unit surface area ratio, because of the tilt. However, the interations with the atmosphere scale with the apparent thickness of the atmosphere at that latitude, and those rays have to cut through a thicker slice of atmosphere to even get to the ground, so there's a further attenuation of the strength.

          Which raises an interesting question - has the aurora record changed significantly, and does it corroborate the magnetometers' readings?
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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 14 2019, @02:08AM (1 child)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 14 2019, @02:08AM (#786218)

        Does Isla Santa Cruz @ 0.64 degrees South count?

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