http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7003537762
"The ships logs from the voyages of Captain Cook have yielded a new discovery: the gradual weakening of Earth’s magnetic field is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discovery has led experts to question whether the Earth is on track towards a polarity reversal."
"The field’s strength is now declining at a rate that suggests it could virtually disappear in about 2000 years. Researchers have speculated that this ongoing change may be the prelude to a magnetic reversal, during which the north and south magnetic pole swap places."
It happened before and it'll happen again.
I read Slashdot's take on it http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/13/1516234 and I thought they were awfully calm about it.
Wouldn't such an event create total chaos?
from Wikipedia:
Since a magnetic field reversal has never been observed by humans and the mechanism of field generation is not well understood, it is difficult to say what the characteristics of the magnetic field might be leading up to such a reversal. Some speculate that a greatly diminished magnetic field during a reversal period will expose the surface of the earth to a substantial and potentially damaging increase in cosmic radiation. However, Homo erectus and their ancestors certainly survived many previous reversals. There is no uncontested evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any biological extinctions. A possible explanation is that the solar wind may induce a sufficient magnetic field in the Earth's ionosphere to shield energetic particles even in the absence of the Earth's normal magnetic field [1].
I see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal says
"Although the inspection of past reversals does not indicate biological extinctions, present society with its reliance of electricity and electromagnetic effects (e.g. radio, satellite communications) may be vulnerable to technological diruptions in the event of a full field reversal."
"may be"? So nobody knows what would happen? Or is it about the magnitude of a solar flare, i.e. not very serious?
The mechanism generating the Earth's magnetic field itself is not well understood, so nobody knows exactly what happens during a pole reversal. Electric and electronic equipment would probably be more sensitive to fluctuations of the field rather than the absence of a field. Lacking any information of what kind of fluctuations to expect, there's really no way to know what the effects would be.
I hope everyone will be ok except for the Earth turning into a global Van de Graaff generator. It would be both a potential extinction event and a new trend in fashion.
>turning into a global Van de Graaff generator.
That would open the door to Free Energy, at long last! :)