Post by jonnygemini on Dec 9, 2005 11:30:39 GMT -5
via: www.sploid.com
Magnetic North was fairly stable for about 400 years, but over the last century it has moved over 600 miles, and could be headed for Siberia in the next 50 years.
As magnetic north moves it takes aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, with it. This migration could well lead to as many as 100,000 deaths from skin cancer alone. Some are trying to downplay the danger.
"This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada," said Stoner, an assistant professor in OSU's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. "There is a lot of variability in its movement."
Because the records on magnetic north only reach back 400 years, Stoner and his colleagues have been taking core samples to track the sediment record of Arctic lakes.
"There is a lot of variability in the polar motion," Stoner pointed out, "but it isn't something that occurs often. There appears to be a 'jerk' of the magnetic field that takes place every 500 years or so. The bottom line is that geomagnetic changes can be a lot more abrupt than we ever thought."
[See?!?! It's moving!!!] But others take a more realistic view of this unstoppable menace. Paleomagnetist have determined that the Earth has gone through periodic pole reversals forever, the last one having occurred some 780,000 years ago, and some see evidence that we are due to go through another one.
In 2002 the Orsted satellite took the first pictures of the Earth's magnetic field in 20 years. Among the discoveries was a huge, growing patch in the field over South America pointing in the opposite direction as the rest of the globe.
This and other quirks have already reduced the strength of the field by 10 percent, a trend that could eliminate the dipole altogether within 2,000 years.
"We can't really tell what will happen," says Gauthier Hulot of the Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris. "But we speculate that we're in an unusual situation that might be related to a reversal."
Seeing as these reversals take place about once every 250,000 years, we are triply overdue for another one, and there is one thing we do know about its consequences.
[Die pretty] cosmic radiation. These holes will likely be around the equator, where global population is most dense. As more and more cosmic radiation beats down on more and more people, cancer will be rampant.
Magnetic North was fairly stable for about 400 years, but over the last century it has moved over 600 miles, and could be headed for Siberia in the next 50 years.
As magnetic north moves it takes aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, with it. This migration could well lead to as many as 100,000 deaths from skin cancer alone. Some are trying to downplay the danger.
"This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada," said Stoner, an assistant professor in OSU's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. "There is a lot of variability in its movement."
Because the records on magnetic north only reach back 400 years, Stoner and his colleagues have been taking core samples to track the sediment record of Arctic lakes.
"There is a lot of variability in the polar motion," Stoner pointed out, "but it isn't something that occurs often. There appears to be a 'jerk' of the magnetic field that takes place every 500 years or so. The bottom line is that geomagnetic changes can be a lot more abrupt than we ever thought."
[See?!?! It's moving!!!] But others take a more realistic view of this unstoppable menace. Paleomagnetist have determined that the Earth has gone through periodic pole reversals forever, the last one having occurred some 780,000 years ago, and some see evidence that we are due to go through another one.
In 2002 the Orsted satellite took the first pictures of the Earth's magnetic field in 20 years. Among the discoveries was a huge, growing patch in the field over South America pointing in the opposite direction as the rest of the globe.
This and other quirks have already reduced the strength of the field by 10 percent, a trend that could eliminate the dipole altogether within 2,000 years.
"We can't really tell what will happen," says Gauthier Hulot of the Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris. "But we speculate that we're in an unusual situation that might be related to a reversal."
Seeing as these reversals take place about once every 250,000 years, we are triply overdue for another one, and there is one thing we do know about its consequences.
[Die pretty] cosmic radiation. These holes will likely be around the equator, where global population is most dense. As more and more cosmic radiation beats down on more and more people, cancer will be rampant.