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Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

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Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#91

Post by doctorRetro »

isostatic wrote: post #9
justaman wrote: post #5

I wanted to share one of my favorite sites: https://www.pssurvival.com/ Pole shifts are popular among "preppers" which in my opinion tend to be quite eccentric. However this website is full of great information that we often take for granted.

I have no idea what that site is, but this is the introduction: This is a shift of the earth's crust with respect to the earth's core generated north and south magnetic poles. Earth's magnetic poles are created by the flow of ions in the earth's core and is somewhat closely aligned to be parallel to the axis of rotation. We expect about 90 degree shift of the crust as planet-X passes earth's orbit on its way through…

I stopped reading at "as planet-X passes earth's orbit".

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#92

Post by njarboe »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #86
mrspeaker wrote: post #2

"While any magnetic-field flip would still be thousands of years away...". Sneaky sentence right at the end. Sure the last one happened 700,000 years ago, so it is "soon", the but article made it sound like it was happening tomorrow!

There are a couple of issues here and it is important to be careful about not conflating them. One, is the question of "how long" does a flip take? There is some evidence that it can take as few as 100 years[1], the previous consensus estimate (2004) was about 7000 years[2]. That is important because the faster it happens the more havoc it is likely to cause. If it happens over thousands of years then humans will ada…

Previous estimates on the time it takes for a flip to happen are in the 1000-30000 year range[1]. That paper gives a 7000 yr average but the variance on the time it takes is likely large. The Berkeley article you linked to is on this paper[2] which makes a claim of that short flipping time. People in the field think it is quite an unlikely short period of time for a flip and we would need more evidence to firmly believe they can happen this fast. Sediments are notoriously complicated on how they record the magnetic field and the rates at which they are deposited at are difficult to determine.

Source: I did my PhD work on the Steens Mountain reversal. It is the Earth's reversal with the most transitional directions recorded in much more reliable volcanic rocks. This was possible because of the huge volume of the Columbia River Basalts that were erupting at that time around 16.7 million years ago. Unfortunately it happened so long ago that direct radioactive dating of its length is impossible with current methods.

[1]https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02459

[2]https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggu287

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#93

Post by jcranmer »

doctorRetro wrote: post #91
isostatic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what that site is, but this is the introduction: This is a shift of the earth's crust with respect to the earth's core generated north and south magnetic poles. Earth's magnetic poles are created by the flow of ions in the earth's core and is somewhat closely aligned to be parallel to the axis of rotation. We expect about 90 degree shift of the crust as planet-X passes earth's orbit on its way through…

I stopped reading at "as planet-X passes earth's orbit".

I skipped ahead to figure out when they claimed it was going to happen. The document is dated 2013. The summary of the results basically says "calculate it yourself, it's not our fault if it's wrong, but 2014 and 2017 look like the best dates."

I wonder why doomsayers keep predicting the end of the world to be in the imminent future? It makes it way too easy to be proven wrong.

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#94

Post by Pharmakon »

njarboe wrote: post #85

Articles on the fear of the Earth's field flipping are, as expected, not very realistic. The best current knowledge is that it takes thousands of years for the field to flip and the current fluctuations are within normal bounds. The wikipedia article on the Earth's magnetic field[1] is pretty good. See relevant quote from it below. Scientists recently updated the standard Gaussian coefficients used to describe the Ea…

When you say the pressure conditions can be recreated for milliseconds, is this using a diamond anvil or some other technique? Beyond that, I just wanted to thank you for this post, and your reply to someone else higher up in the thread. Reading the views of subject matter experts is what drew me here in the first place.

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#95

Post by njarboe »

Pharmakon wrote: post #94
njarboe wrote: post #85

Articles on the fear of the Earth's field flipping are, as expected, not very realistic. The best current knowledge is that it takes thousands of years for the field to flip and the current fluctuations are within normal bounds. The wikipedia article on the Earth's magnetic field[1] is pretty good. See relevant quote from it below. Scientists recently updated the standard Gaussian coefficients used to describe the Ea…

When you say the pressure conditions can be recreated for milliseconds, is this using a diamond anvil or some other technique? Beyond that, I just wanted to thank you for this post, and your reply to someone else higher up in the thread. Reading the views of subject matter experts is what drew me here in the first place.

Diamond anvil tech is just advancing into the realm where the pressure of the surface of the outer core can be held for long enough for chemical reactions to reach equilibrium. That is, to be highly useful to see what might be happening in the core. Heating up to high temperatures at the same time is an added difficulty and can only be done for a shorter time periods. I'm not an expert on diamond anvils, but follow the advancements some. It is how we are going to actually get a good idea of the possibilities of what goes on in the deep Earth. It would be really cool if humans decided to try and tunnel the 3000km to the core so we could sample it directly and be able to do long timescale experiments on bulk samples. I don't think physics fundamentally prohibits such a thing.

By short time I mean that some physical properties of matter at high temperatures and pressures can be determined by observing high velocity collisions or explosions, but these are short lived phenomena. A lot of effort has been spent on experiments like this for understanding how nuclear bombs behave. Some of those experiments help inform, say, the properties of iron under high temp and pressure and have been declassified so us mere Earth scientists can learn about it.

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#96

Post by OldSchoolJohnny »

jcranmer wrote: post #93
doctorRetro wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped reading at "as planet-X passes earth's orbit".

I skipped ahead to figure out when they claimed it was going to happen. The document is dated 2013. The summary of the results basically says "calculate it yourself, it's not our fault if it's wrong, but 2014 and 2017 look like the best dates." I wonder why doomsayers keep predicting the end of the world to be in the imminent future? It makes it way too easy to be proven wrong.

Because no one would care if it was too far in the future?

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#97

Post by njarboe »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #73
lenticular wrote: post #20

As it says in the article, we don't have anything to fear at the surface. Reversals have never been associated with increased extinction. When the field does reverse, it becomes increasingly disordered with higher-order moments dominating. If I recall, the dipole moment of Earth's magnetic field is normally over 90% of the strength. The higher-order moments dissipate faster, so it doesn't reach as far into space.

Given there are lots of species that use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation this is highly surprising. Perhaps there have been mass extinctions but they're not readily found, or our timings are wrong so they don't appear synchronised? I wonder if there wouldn't be more seismic activity?

The magnetic field also gets very weak (90% drop in intensity and the magnetic pole way down near the equator) quite often. These are call magnetic excursions. They happen at an average frequency of maybe 50 thousand years or so with a high variance. The last big one is called the Las Champ excursion and happened about 41 thousand year ago. Species that needed a strong magnetic field that points north or south to exist would have gone extinct long ago. These species must have ways to survive when the Earth's magnetic field is unstable and weak because that happens on timescales much shorter than species evolution.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#98

Post by njarboe »

pmoriarty wrote: post #81
iamthepieman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a rabbit hole i did not need to spend the last 30 minutes on. For those who don't have the time like I didn't Organite is a substance made of resin metals and quartz that balances and harmonizes Bio-energy (known as orgone). Orgone is analogous to chi or prana and is a type of bio-energy that reverses the effect of entropy[0] It seems to be a mix of crystal healing and EMF grounding (also known as earthing)…

The rabbit hole goes deeper than that. You should research Wilhelm Reich[1], a student of Freud's who came up with the term "orgone", who fled to the US to escape the Nazis only to have his writings confiscated and burnt by the US government, which imprisoned him until he died. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

"imprisoned him until he died"

True? He died a year in to a two year sentence for violating an injunction against him from committing fraud by selling his orgone accumulators.

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#99

Post by dTal »

pmoriarty wrote: post #81
iamthepieman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a rabbit hole i did not need to spend the last 30 minutes on. For those who don't have the time like I didn't Organite is a substance made of resin metals and quartz that balances and harmonizes Bio-energy (known as orgone). Orgone is analogous to chi or prana and is a type of bio-energy that reverses the effect of entropy[0] It seems to be a mix of crystal healing and EMF grounding (also known as earthing)…

The rabbit hole goes deeper than that. You should research Wilhelm Reich[1], a student of Freud's who came up with the term "orgone", who fled to the US to escape the Nazis only to have his writings confiscated and burnt by the US government, which imprisoned him until he died. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

"Until he died" being a year, days before his parole, lest anyone think the US government sentences people to life in prison for quackery.

I think this is underappreciated ethical dilemma, rather like Typhoid Mary. I don't think that Wilhelm Reich thought of himself as a quack, or a fraud - he was more of a kind of technological mystic. While he himself was doubtless earnest, this kind of thing really is memetically dangerous - Scientology, for example, is a deliberate and successful attempt to weaponize it. Even now, people do crazy things like "seed" areas with "orgonite" to dispel "negative energy" - that is, they litter the ground with bits of metal encased with resin. A whole religion of woo, just from a few years of exposure to Reich's ideas.

So what is one to do with someone who is earnestly good-intentioned, highly charismatic, and completely stark-raving mad?

Re: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

#100

Post by krapp »

dTal wrote: post #99
pmoriarty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rabbit hole goes deeper than that. You should research Wilhelm Reich[1], a student of Freud's who came up with the term "orgone", who fled to the US to escape the Nazis only to have his writings confiscated and burnt by the US government, which imprisoned him until he died. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

"Until he died" being a year, days before his parole, lest anyone think the US government sentences people to life in prison for quackery. I think this is underappreciated ethical dilemma, rather like Typhoid Mary. I don't think that Wilhelm Reich thought of himself as a quack, or a fraud - he was more of a kind of technological mystic. While he himself was doubtless earnest, this kind of thing really is memetically…

>So what is one to do with someone who is earnestly good-intentioned, highly charismatic, and completely stark-raving mad?

Ignore them as you should any other crackpot, charlatan or fraud. Don't waste your energy, time or money on them except to be entertained.

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