Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting More Quickly Than Believed

While many mysteries yet remain to be solved in this area, there has been substantial evidence that shows that the Earth's magnetic field does indeed shift and even reverse periodically. When these reversals arise, they are marked by areas of magnetic fields intensifying and shifting on the planet at an increasing rate. The rate and extent that this is now happening at points to the fact that we in may be on the verge of such a reversal.
There would seem to be a period where Earth's ElectroMagnetic field does not provide the life on our planet protection from the multitude of (extreme) radiations of space. As others have noted, though we know almost nothing of it, obviously nature has a way of dealing with it because life still exists here in spite of this. How much is it altered during such periods though? Are there extinctions that coincide with these periods of ElectroMagnetic instability and reversal?

What of the impact on the now abundant technologies that are based on ElectroMagnetics ?
What will still work ?
What won't work ?
Most modern electronics operates on DC and are thus biased towards specific directions of power flow. Will we just be able to 'take the batteries out and turn them around and put them back in again' and they will still work as before? I doubt it.

I'm hoping that the multitude of fields that are affected will very quickly begin to address this issue. We've opened 'Pandora's Box' with our science and let the 'Genie out of the bottle' long before we had the knowledge and wisdom to do it without destroying our BioSphere. But what is clear is that if we are going to be able to survive, and I'm not convinced that in our present form it is sustainable, we can't do if WITHOUT technology.

The only thing that wouldn't work if the Earth's Magnetic Field reverses would be the compass, where North would become South, and South would become North.

On the subject of "Pandora's Box" with science, which science do you mean? Do you mean when science helped develop the spear, or the house, or the wheel, or running water? Or do you only count the advances of the 20th century? The only crime of science is it has allowed us to trade real dangers for imagined ones.

This leads to a wonderful opportunity that is ripe for the exploitation.

First, we had Y2K, now we have PRK (Pole Reversal Kinetics)!

For the lucky few that get on board early there will be a bounty of wealth. Think of the PRK grants that will soon be awarded. There will be cottage industries springing up everywhere repainting compass needles and compass balls for marine and aviation (not to mention those cute automotive compasses on your dash).

A new breed of environmentalist will emerge from this called the PRK Enviro-mist (A.K.A. PRK Wacko) whose charter will be to gather up all the northern hemisphere metalloreducens (magnetic bacteria) and transplant them to the southern hemisphere. Simultaneously, PRK-Es will be gathering up metalloreducens from the southern hemisphere for the long and arduous journey north.

Still other captains of industry will be creating the first commercial UV umbrella designed to act as a temporary shield in the absence of our magnetic field as it undergoes reversal. Expect door-to-door salesmen (and women) very soon offering similar products to apply to your roof and walls of your home (all at attractive home equity rates). New variants of sun block will be created to ward off the ill effects of the solar wind. This will include savvy products like Proton Stik for the lips.

SpaceWeather.com will get its own cable TV channel.

For those that rather fight than switch, expect news from Europe for a Euro-Alliance Generator project in a "vain" attempt to generate an artificial magnetic pole. Although the Alliance will certainly succeed in creating such a generator, they will probably never agree as to where it should be placed.

Are you in the educational vocation? There will be endless opportunities to revise science text books. For you bureaucrats at heart, an international committee will need to be created to determine exactly where the north and south poles shall go on rare earth magnets. This could turn the spherical magnet industry upside down. After all, we can't have a planet that has a polarity in one direction and a rare earth magnet in the other and both be called a "north" pole.

Cartographers will be needed to update maps. There appears to be no end to the social and economic boon this could lead to. It defies imagination.

PRK offers something for everybody. The time is ripe. Don't be a Neanderthal, be a PRK pioneer! Join the leaders of the PRK movement before it is too late!!!

Call 1-800 GO PRK TODAY for your free CD on how you can get on the ground floor of this limited, but exciting opportunity. Pole reversals only come around once every 100 millenniums. Don't let this one pass you by. Call today!

PRK is not a religion.

Here is the best but most simple explanation. As a top would spin, it balances on the pinical of the tip at a rapid rate. The key word is "BALANCE", as we have been predicted too by many a scientist over the past 100 years about our planet and the squandering of its' resources. Now take that top and shave a small portion of meat from on side of it. Now the top is unbalanced. Our earth is this very same likeness of a spinning top. Over teh past 150 years, our cililization has striped our planet of valuable resources from all over its' spherical bodies. We have done the worste by stripping much too many trees from the serface. We have dug deep into the bowels of our planet to extract oar and coal and many riches for our greedy wantings. We have not paid close minds to this ramped excavation and how the tillings have been redistributed. Over the past century, the populace of our planet has increased ~3-4 times and the weight distribution has become an imbalance across the planet. Our land masses have displaid this in the most recent of tectonic plate movement and the devestated shifts on the core. We have created an unstable serface weight too core movement and thus it has started.

Just some quick numbers to counter"balance" the argument made above. The mass of the earth is 5.974x10^24 kg. The total mass of man is 5.2x10^11 (6.5billion people at 80kg each) for a whopping total of 8.7x10-16 percent of the Earth's mass. This is assuming that the mass of man comes out of nowhere and is not replacing other mass, such as food! The Earth adds about 10^8kg just from space debris everyday, or the mass of all of mankind every 14 years. Finally, who would have done all this weight redistribution (mining etc...) the other times the magnetic poles shifted?

The best but most simple explaination? I don't think so. How can you say that the population of mankind has caused the earth to be off-balance? In case you forget elementary school physics, matter cannot be created or destroyed! If a person is born, do you really think that he/she was created from nothing? Out of thin air? Whatever matter is making up that newborn had to come from somewhere, maybe food. It is irresponsible also to say that the weight of humans occupying a section of land would cause the tectonic plates to shift. That is rediculous! But it is obvious that you are not to be taken seriously because you don't take yourself seriously enough to proofread your own work.

Actually, it is all the steel and iron that China has been recently importing that is causing the pole to shift towards Siberia.

I believe I've read somewhere that the shift in magnetic field polarity is now understood to be caused by convection currants in the earth's molten iron core. This is the 'motor' that generates the field in conjunction with the earth's spin.

The hypothesis states that the oscillation will grow bigger over a period of a few hundred years, swap ends at half time, and gradually reduce to a stable position again. This occurrence has been now to occur at regular intervals over the life span of the earth, (not in the mid west states, however, where the earth is only 6000 years old.) and guess what! It's now about due.

Maybe someone could help me out of my ignorance. How is it possible to determine how often the earths magnetic poles have shifted over the last, what was it, 4 and a half billion years, when we can only find evidence(archeological and otherwise) of man's existence for the last 5k to 6k years? If the earth is really that old I think we should conduct further studies. At least for the next 100k years before drawing any definitive conclusions. By then we might actually know something about this planet instead of just speculating on our own observations filtered through our limited intellect. It just seems absurd to make definite, athoritative , statements based on what amounts to a momentary glance at the situation.

Right, I'll try -

Past field reversals can be and have been recorded in the "frozen" minerals of solidified sedimentary deposits or cooled volcanic flows on land. Originally, however, the past record of geomagnetic reversals was first noticed by observing the magnetic stripe "anomalies" on the ocean floor. Since the sea floor spreads at an essentially constant rate, this results in broadly evident "stripes" from which the past magnetic field polarity can be inferred by looking at the data gathered from simply towing a magnetometer along the sea floor. Most sedimentary rocks incorporate tiny amounts of iron rich minerals, whose orientation is influenced by the ambient magnetic field at the time at which they formed. These can be used as markers for the prevailing magnetic polarity

Because the magnetic field is present globally, finding similar patterns of magnetic variations at different sites is one method used to correlate age across different locations. In the past four decades great amounts of data have accumulated, for current seafloor ages, to such an extent that such data have become an important tool used to estimate the age of geologic sections in the field. This is not an independent dating method, but is dependent on absolute age dating methods

Obviously, this isn't accurate to within much more then a million years or so, but is widely regarded as a firm indication of past activity.