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Earth's Magnetic Pole Reversals / 'Flips'

sunsplash said:
Nice.

There's an interplay between magnetic fields (the Earths and the Suns), that hasn't been accounted for in the study mentioned.
:)

Yes, none of these reports seem to take into account the magnetic interactions between the planets.
Lucky us - we've got the moon's gravity to cause tidal pulls and stir up the Earth's core. Without it, we probably wouldn't be here.
 
The other Ian Rankin reckons it's T Minus 30 years

This is an article from the Telegraph. I think you need to be registered, so I'll reproduce in the entireity.


Fasten your seat-belts, the end is nigh(Filed: 25/08/2004)

Baronet, inventor and financier turned apocalyptic author Sir Ian Rankin tells Judith Woods why the world is just 30 years from disaster.
When Sir Ian Rankin was growing up on the Isle of Mull, his mother would regularly disappear for weeks on end to London.

While his father frittered away the family fortune on hopelessly ill-advised bird conservation projects that "disappeared into the sea", Lady Jean Rankin would be at Buckingham Palace, performing her duties as Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother.Later, when he was a schoolboy at Eton and she was staying at Windsor, Rankin's mother would invite him to tea in her rooms. She would meet him at the gates and smuggle him through a warren of dimly lit rooms that mostly appeared to house stamp and medal collections.

"Once, she was hurrying me through a room when we saw a little figure bent over a case of medals," he says. "My mother immediately went over, took the man's hand and curtseyed. But, as a joke, he simultaneously curtseyed back - and they toppled over. As they were rolling across the floor, I realised the little man was George VI."

By any standards, Rankin's background is one of quintessential British eccentricity - a tradition he is keeping alive and well. This week, he publishes a natural science book, Doomsday Just Ahead, in which he confidently predicts that civilisation will be wiped out in 30 years' time, when the "Earth flips over on its axis".

"I strongly believe that we are heading for disaster," he says. "If you are lying on a beach in your bikini, you will suddenly find yourself feeling rather cold at the North Pole. And the associated dramatic weather movements will see humans and animals blown about and crushed to pieces."According to Rankin, the ice ages were nothing of the sort; rather, they were what he calls "pole shifts". He cites as evidence the fact that the remains of mammoths have shown that there were flowers in the beasts' stomachs and mouths when they died. This indicates, he believes, that they were enjoying summer conditions when they froze.

As Rankin sees it, the Earth must have moved rapidly on its axis through 140 degrees, putting the creatures close to the opposite pole. More radically still, he claims that human civilisation has reached its current sophisticated levels many times before - and on each occasion was obliterated by a pole shift."Before the last so-called 'ice age', there were people just as culturally and technologically advanced as we are now.

This didn't just happen once, but many times," he says. "With few humans left, technological development is lost without trace, and man has to revert to stone-age conditions."At the centre of the book is what he calls his "new theory", a rather bold contention that gravity doesn't exist (hence the Earth can flip over) and that the Sun isn't the centre of the solar system, but is revolving round a magnetic centre - a black hole that is as yet undiscovered.

Given the assured manner in which he expounds his hypotheses and the breadth of reference included in his book, one might assume that Rankin, 71, has a background steeped in science. Not a bit of it. Having read PPE at Oxford, he enjoyed what might, these days, be called a portfolio career over several decades, encompassing journalism, the advertising account for Elizabeth Arden, seat-belt manufacture, the design of miniature motorbikes and an employment agency in Holland.Latterly, he set up an oil company and travelled the world looking for hydrocarbons. It was this experience and seeing the fascinating geology of the Earth's crust that sparked his layman's interest in planetary movements and the solar system.

"I've done a lot of reading and research," he says. "I find this a fascinating subject, and an important one."Rankin's father, an ornithologist and photographer, was the great-grandson of a shipowner who died in 1870, leaving £15 million - the present-day equivalent of more than £1 billion. Yet, by 1965, when Rankin's father died, the money had all been spent.

"My father was terribly good at spending money," says Rankin, fondly, as though it were a charming idiosyncrasy to fritter away hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. "He spent one winter in Antarctica writing the definitive bird book Antarctic Isle. At home, he was terribly good at making parks for rare ducks and geese, and then high tide would come and wash them all away."Both his parents had pilot's licences, and owned a private aeroplane, in which Jean liked to undertake "loops and spins". "We lived in a farmhouse on a 2,000-acre estate, which was pretty small beer by Scottish standards. My brother and I had a fairly conventional upbringing," says Rankin, before adding, by way of an afterthought, that one of his uncles would regularly land home-made planes on their lawn.

Lady Jean Rankin was in the service of the Queen Mother for more than 40 years. She also became a close friend of Princess Margaret, and, as her 2001 Daily Telegraph obituary reported, lent the Queen's sister much support during her fraught relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend. But the family was only dimly aware of the role she played.
"My mother kept her royal life very much to herself. The royal entourage is very private and husbands of ladies in waiting had a rotten time, because they were simply excluded. She would disappear off three or four times a year and never talk about what she'd been doing."The spendthrift nature of Rankin's father left his son with a keen awareness that he would have to work for a living. At university, he found himself dispatched to Budapest to show student solidarity with the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. There, he narrowly missed death when a bullet pierced the car in which he was fleeing the re-invading Russian army. When he returned, he wrote articles for the Observer and the News Chronicle, before becoming an advertising copywriter for Yardley and Elizabeth Arden.

"One afternoon in the early 1960s, a man came into my office and said, 'Do you want to make a lot of money?' I said, 'Of course,' and he said, 'Come out with me at lunchtime and I'll show you how,'" says Rankin, as though it were perfectly normal to be approached by a stranger promising to make his fortune."He took me to a shop in High Holborn which sold car seat-belts, which were very unusual in those days. He said, 'This is the future. Can you design a better one than this?' So I did."The design Rankin came up with was rejected. Unperturbed, he took a gamble and set about manufacturing it himself. "My belt was featured as a best buy in Which? magazine and it made me more money than I've ever made since."After seat-belts came the microbike, a brief and unsuccessful foray into miniature motorcyles. Then he entered the world of investment in the 1970s, and at various times was chairman of a textile firm, of a company that ran greyhound stadiums and of an optical business.

The following decade, he started his oil company, which had exploration interests in Australia, Belize, Guatemala, North America and Indonesia."I was so amazed at the land formations, some of which were quite astonishing and unexplained, that I wanted to discover more about the earth, so I wrote Doomsday. I'm not the only person to believe these theories, but it's a small minority who think along these lines."His book, peppered with references to ancient mythology, Darwinism, archaeology and black holes, is aimed at the layman. He concedes that the scientific world might well choose to ignore publication of his book, and is certain it will be "pooh-poohed" in some quarters. But Rankin's self-belief is unshakeable."Whenever someone is challenging conventional thinking, it's not safe for a scientist to support a radical line of thinking," he says, with a twinkle in his eye. "Nothing may happen - but something might. I'm looking forward to a bit of a fray."· Doomsday Just Ahead by Ian Niall Rankin (The Book Guild) is published on August 26. To order for £16.95 plus £2.25 p&p, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222

Wow! Gravity doesn't exist! "undiscovered" black holes in our solar system. The classic "flowers in the mouths of mammoths". This guy obviously owes a debt of thanks to our Russian friend Immanuel.
I suppose the real question is: With his proximity to the throne, do you think old Charlie boy is a confirmed "Rankist"?
 
Marion said:
Interesting , my Geology teacher used to scare us with speculations of violent sudden pole reversals , and delighted in telling us we were just about due for the next one ( the sod ) . Now I can stop worrying !

I read an article about this happenning about...8 years ago, I think. Would have been in the Daily Mail/Express, and the article writer linked it with the 2012 Mayan calender end. It's worried me ever since.
 
I still find it amusing that some people think pole reversal = the planet literally rotating, rather than the Earth's magnetic field. For some reason it conjoures up an image a bit like someone having a rug pulled from underneath them, as if the Earth's crust suddenly just starts sliding away at a rapid pace.
 
TO;JerryB

Thats exactly what is happening,we are geting the carpet pulled out from under us,not only that we are helping to pull it.
Billo
 
Re: TO;JerryB

Bill said:
Thats exactly what is happening,we are geting the carpet pulled out from under us,not only that we are helping to pull it.
Billo

I would have said this was one of the things humans can't cause, or prevent.
 
Re: TO;JerryB

Bill said:
Thats exactly what is happening,we are geting the carpet pulled out from under us,not only that we are helping to pull it.
Billo

Ok matey, how's this supposed to happen them? As in how is anything I am doing altering the magetic flux/magnetoshpere of the planet I share with you?

:)
 
I think Bill may be trying to say that we're being kept in the dark about what's really going to happen by some shadowy types out there... ;)

But then again, Bill tends to hint at such things quite alot but never comes up with any evidence :D
 
There's a Clive Cussler book that is stuck on the premise that the magnetic pole reversal is caused by the entire crust rotating. Apparently it's a big Christian Creation Science thing. I scribbled some back of the envelope guess calculations looking at the friction forces involved, and just howled. They have this idea about super-heated water between the crust and the mantle, apparently, that overcomes that force so a meteor hit could loosen the crust. Apparently that's how come there's a Viking map of Antarctica - because Antarctica used to be somewhere else, and that's how the flood occured.

I'm really surprised the magnetic field reversal is news. I covered this in detail during my oceanography degree and that was 12 years ago.

Sam
 
EVIDENCE!!!!!!

BECAUSE THE PLANET'S AXSIS IS TILTING OVER THIS CHANGES OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SUN.
THUS:A CHANGE IN WEATHER PATTENS(a word was made up to describe this,El Neneo.
Bill 2004
 
Something to think about.

Take 2 balls(one yello Sun,one green Earth)paint a red strip around the Earth ball(thats the equator and a dot at the top and bottm of the ball(your North and South Pole)
Now place the Sun into your left hand and the Earth into your right hand.
Hold each appart (keeping the Sun still) and the red strip on the Earth ball facing towards the Sun(OK so far?)
Slowley tilt the Equator (red strip) down you will notice that the Northern Hemisphere will recieve more direct Sun and if you tilt the Equator the other way the Southern Hemisphere will get more direct Sun.
Ponder over this please.
Bill.
 
Re: Something to think about.

Bill said:
Ponder over this please.
Bill.
:confused:
Both hemisphere are tilted towards the sun in turn during the course of a year because the axis of the earth remains (roughly) pointing in the same direction (at Polaris). That isn't anything new, it is how the seasons happen. There are effects that cause the Earths axis to wobble, but I don't think hey are related to human activity.
 
Well.

We are hollowing out the planet by extracting (oil,gas,minerals etc)doe's this not change the density of the orb(Gia) we live on,thus changing it's relateship with the space the orb(Gia) is living in.
Bill.
 
Re: Well.

Bill said:
We are hollowing out the planet by extracting (oil,gas,minerals etc)doe's this not change the density of the orb(Gia) we live on,thus changing it's relateship with the space the orb(Gia) is living in.
Bill.

The size of the holes is probably trivial compared with the total volume of the Earth, they tend to fill up with something - either collapse, or fill with water. Most of the stuff we extract sticks around on or very close to the Earth. We're only shuffling the surface layers around a bit.
 
Re: Well.

Bill said:
We are hollowing out the planet by extracting (oil,gas,minerals etc)doe's this not change the density of the orb(Gia) we live on,thus changing it's relateship with the space the orb(Gia) is living in.
Bill.

That's a bit like saying sticking a pin in your face will make your head fall off...
 
Re: Well.

Bill said:
We are hollowing out the planet by extracting (oil,gas,minerals etc)doe's this not change the density of the orb(Gia) we live on,thus changing it's relateship with the space the orb(Gia) is living in.
Bill.
Only in the same way that a fly hitting the windscreen of you car will knock the car off the road. :)
 
Consider this.

If(?)all the planets have a magnetic North/South pole in our Solar System and the universe is expanding,is it then possible that all the planets are working in tangent and that ALL POLES are tilting similtanealsy (together that is)).
bILL.
 
Consider this(source N.A.S.A.)

(2) The rotation axis of Uranus is tilted by about 90 degrees, causing extreme seasonal variations in sunlight.
The Jovian planets have a wide range of axial tilts.
Jupiter has a rotation axis which is nearly perpendicular to its orbit around the Sun. It is tilted by only 3 degrees. Thus, there is very little seasonal variation in sunlight on Jupiter. No matter where you are on Jupiter or what time of year it is, the Sun rises almost due east, and sets almost due west five hours later. Boring.
Saturn and Neptune have rotation axes tilted by about 30 degrees, only slightly more than the tilt of the Earth's axis. Thus, the seasonal variation in sunlight on these Jovian planets strongly resembles that of the Earth.
Uranus has a rotation axis tilted by 98 degrees. Thus, Uranus is essentially ``lying on its side''.
The extreme tilt of the axis of Uranus has important implications for the weather on that planet. Consider how the seasons vary during the course of one uranian year:
Winter solstice (which last occurred in 1985 AD):
The north pole is pointed almost directly away from the Sun.
The northern hemisphere experiences perpetual darkness.
The southern hemisphere experiences perpetual sunlight.

Spring equinox (2006 AD):
The rotation axis is perpendicular to the Uranus-Sun direction.
From any point on Uranus, the Sun rises in the east
and sets in the west 8 1/2 hours later.
Summer solstice (2027 AD): The north pole is pointed almost directly toward the Sun.
The north experiences perpetual sunlight.
The south experiences perpetual darkness.

And so on...
Note that during summer and winter, the uneven heating of the two hemispheres will tend to make winds blow in the north-south direction, decreasing the importance of the east-west bands that exist on the other Jovian planets. Note, however, that the effects of uneven solar heating are reduced by the fact that Uranus is so far from the Sun. Sunlight on Uranus is 370 times weaker than sunlight on the Earth.
Bill.
 
Bill said:
If(?)all the planets have a magnetic North/South pole in our Solar System and the universe is expanding,is it then possible that all the planets are working in tangent and that ALL POLES are tilting similtanealsy (together that is)).
bILL.

The strength and orientation of the magnetic fields varies wildly across the solar system. Mercury, Earth and the gas gianst have strong magnetic fields, Venus and Mars, the closest planets to us, have very week ones. Most planets have fields roughly aligned with their axis except Uranus which has a bizzarely tilted axis to start with, and has a field not even centred on its core.

I don't think there is much interaction between our magnetic field and that of the other planets. Pole reversal is a natural phenomenon which has happened hundreds of times in geological history.


Pole reversal and geology:
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/reversal.htm

The magnetic fields of the planets:
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/planetmg.htm
 
What do you make of this(source Austen,s link)

All four giant planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune--were visited by Voyager 2. (The first two were also visited by Pioneer 10 and 11 and by Voyager 1, and the probe Ulysses flew by Jupiter, while the probe Galileo is currently in orbit around it.) All four have magnetic fields much stronger than the Earth's, in the sense defined above for Jupiter. Saturn's magnetic axis, remarkably, seems to be exactly lined up with its rotation axis, within the accuracy of observations.
 
Re: Consider this(source N.A.S.A.)

Bill said:
(2)
Note that during summer and winter, the uneven heating of the two hemispheres will tend to make winds blow in the north-south direction, decreasing the importance of the east-west bands that exist on the other Jovian planets. Note, however, that the effects of uneven solar heating are reduced by the fact that Uranus is so far from the Sun. Sunlight on Uranus is 370 times weaker than sunlight on the Earth.
Bill.

:confused: How does this effect the magnetic field?
 
What do you make of this.

All four giant planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune--were visited by Voyager 2. (The first two were also visited by Pioneer 10 and 11 and by Voyager 1, and the probe Ulysses flew by Jupiter, while the probe Galileo is currently in orbit around it.) All four have magnetic fields much stronger than the Earth's, in the sense defined above for Jupiter. Saturn's magnetic axis, remarkably, seems to be exactly lined up with its rotation axis, within the accuracy of observations.
Bill.
 
To- Austin

That isa good question,but whatever happens inside a planet affect what is happening on the exteriour. Planet interact with each other energy(in the early days of space travel and to-day in fact to,the SLING SHOT EFFECT ,using the magnetic energy of one planet against another to shoot space craft into deep space)is a good example of using a planets energy)
May be i am getting of the point a bit,sorry.
Bill.
 
Well, the sling shot effect is about gravity rather than magnetism - but in some cases the magnetic field can have dramatic effects outside the planet. The "flux tube" between Jupiter and its moon Io is a case in point.
 
Drilling and mining into the Earth's surface has only made tiny forays into the actual structure of the planet. So I very much doubt that they're effecting 'Gaia' in any way, even if such a thing really exists (outside of the oft-misquoted and misunderstood Gaia theory). If the planet's surface was so fragile, volcanoes would've destroyed it long ago.
 
Bill Asks:
Does Methane add to global warming or is it only fossil fuels?.

Yes it does and it two ways.
The first is when it is burned in natural gas applications such as your gas cooker. The process of burning turns it into CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and H2O (steam). The CO2 adds to the atmosphere which adds to the greenhouse effect.

The second way is by methane simply being in the atmosphere. Methane (CH4) is actually a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, but there is much less of it proportionally than CO2. The levels of methane in the atmosphere are also on the increase and this has been variously explained as more life on a warmer world (Ants/Termites) or more “human” effects (more cattle).

From Article Posted by Emperor from New Scientist:
Scientists had previously thought that the planet would be left without a protective shield to stop lethal radiation from space reaching the surface.

For some time I have wondered if there is actually an increase in evolution during these reduced field times. Perhaps this extra radiation is a driver for evolution on earth rather than the surface cleanser that is portrayed in some of these “doom and gloom” articles. I think that most life on Earth is already radiation hardened, we have a whole bunch of DNA repair mechanisms and cell self destruct mechanisms in place and it is when these processes fail that we get cancer. Perhaps we evolved these mechanisms last flip, when the individuals who didn’t have them all got cancer and died. Would explain the human evolutionary "pinch".
 
Picture this.

The house i have lived in for over 20 years has a balcony facing the WEST,so i see the Sun going down.
I over look gardens below and because i live at the top(4th floor)MY HORIZON IS THE ROOF OF THE ROW OF HOUSES OPPOSITE ME.(with me so far?)
Now! on the longest day(21 june) over 20 years ago the Sun would set(ACCORDING TO MY HORIZON)just LEFT of the CHIMNEY opposite me.
Now!in 2004 the Sun set RIGHT OF THE SAME CHIMNEY and quit a way to!!!!!.
I have been observing this for years now every 21st June and it is a pitty i have not gotten all of this on film.
What do you make of that???
Bill.
 
Ah, that's probably just the CIA moving the buildings...
 
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