Pole shift is happening now!

AntiMatter wrote: »

What will be the effect on human society of a reversal in the magnetic field?

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Okay, a few points here. First of all, the North Magnetic Pole is moving west, not east, actually WNW and to the far north of Canada's arctic islands (which still takes it towards Russia). A little history here, in 1840 the NMP was first reliably located by the Ross expedition, on the Boothia Peninsula on the northern mainland of Canada. From that point on, it was measured regularly and found to be drifting NNW, later NW through Canada's arctic islands, which it finally left around 1980 in the Queen Elizabeth Islands to the west of Axel Heiberg Island (which is that fairly large one west of Ellesmere, which is next to Greenland). So from 1980 to 2007 (last reliable location) it travelled increasingly fast and started curving NW and then WNW and has now reached 84N 110W (approx) which compares to about 68N 90W almost two centuries ago. If it continues on this pace and accelerates a bit more, it could be drifting into the New Siberian Islands north of Siberia by about 2050.

Now, this is not a sign of imminent polar reversal. We only have sketchy ideas where the NMP was located before 1840, the general consensus is that it was in the western Canadian arctic drifting southeast and the Ross expedition just happened to find it at about its most southerly location in recent times. Before that, it could have been almost anywhere, such records as we have found from indirect fossil or pollen evidence tend to point to previous locations north of Scandinavia at some point around the Roman era, so you could imagine that the NMP has perhaps made an irregular circuit of the northern hemisphere over the post-glacial era, and perhaps more than one. So the current activity is no particular cause for alarm.

I say alarm because a reversal of the magnetic poles would be a serious matter on several fronts, not only the weather. But first of all, about the weather ... it's my theory and that of quite a few other researchers that the magnetic poles may distort the hemispheric circulation to at least some extent, in other words, the polar vortex tries to set up in standard locations from climatology but is then pulled out of shape towards a secondary centre near the NMP. This would in fact explain a lot of the recent global warming mystery, since Europe has warmed more rapidly than North America recently, but it was the other way around from 1880 to 1920 (an era when the NMP was rapidly moving away from the subarctic into the arctic). So, you can imagine the atmospheric chaos that might develop if in a reversal episode the poles first weakened and became multiple centres, or even went wildly offset and took up positions in the temperate regions (the two magnetic poles tend to move in sync although not perfectly aligned through the centre of the earth).

So our weather could become quite chaotic and develop new circulation patterns that we might only fully understand once we saw them in progress.

However, that might not even be the worst problem we would face, because the weaker magnetic field during the reversal (a process which probably takes hundreds of years) would allow in more harmful ultra-violet and other radiation, having health impacts and crop impacts regardless of the weather changes. There might also be changes in radio reception and satellite performance during such an episode.

Most credible forecasts of this possibility talk about reversals well into the future but following a continued weakening of the field. Right now, I believe the field is perhaps 20% weaker than its intensity a few centuries back.

I should just mention too, based on reading the discussion above, that the terrestrial poles are not moving around (significantly, they do wander over a very small distance of perhaps 1-2 kms due to second-order orbital variations). So anything to do with standard climatology, sun heating earth, or Milankovitch cycles (which I consider valid but not related directly to geomagnetism) are not part of this concern about magnetic pole wanderings or reversals. If the terrestrial poles shifted, climate zones would shift with them, depending on any given place's new latitude. Given that the continents are drifting and evolving slowly over time, any concept of "polar wandering" is difficult to establish because it's a case of did the pole move or did the continent move? But these processes are much slower than magnetic pole shifts, in fact, the north and south poles have been oriented about where they are now (relative to the main continental features) for at least 30 million years and probably well back towards the Silurian before you would find real changes, and then again, these might have more to do with continental drift than actual orientation changes of the earth's poles (relative let's say to the fixed star background).