Every scout knows how to read a compass, and that there is a magnetic north and a true north. That’s because the Earth’s magnetic field isn’t exactly aligned with the North Pole. Every five years, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey (BGS) get together to decide if magnetic north is still the same as it was before. This time, it isn’t.
The update is to the WMM — the World Magnetic Model. Magnetic north has shifted away from Canada and towards Siberia, a trend that has been ongoing for the last 20 years.
The magnetic pole seems to be decelerating. It is possible that it can change abruptly enough to warrant an emergency update outside the normal five-year cycle. The BGS says if you traveled from South Africa to the UK using the old WMM, your final position would be about 150 km off compared to using the new WMM.
Of course, automated systems will get updates, so there is no need to adjust your phone or GPS unit manually. However, older gear or compasses are getting increasingly less accurate. The North Star, by the way, isn’t exactly to the North, either. For small trips, being a little off of true north probably isn’t an issue.
There have been emergency updates before. While a basic compass is simple to make, that shouldn’t stop you from overcomplicating it.
Declination. It’s literally as old as the hills.
Those dang Ruskies are even stealing the North Pole! This will not stand!
Anyway it does seem like it is taking off in one solid direction rather quickly, instead of slowly ambling around in circles. Maybe there really will be another pole flip soon. It does seem like an interesting event to witness, how rare a treat to be able to live during such a thing.
The Earth’s magnetic field shields us from a lot of solar radiation. It seems likely that living would be more difficult during that period. Possibly by a lot.
Plant life would be probably be severely affected.
The flips happen on average every 200K to 300K years, with a lot of variability. The actual flip takes around 7,000 years.
“May you live in interesting times”
-Terry Pratchett (not Chinese after all)
The Earth’s magnetic field’s protection is indirect: it deflects cosmic rays, which erode the atmosphere, which protects us from UV radiation and cosmic rays. So it’s tough to say “it’d be super bad” because it’s a timescale thing. So a brief (geologically) drop just… doesn’t do enough on the scale of the atmosphere.
There was a brief pole reversal 42kya ago (called an ‘excursion’ – those only last a few hundred years) that happened around the same time as a grand solar minimum, which is a double whammy – and… (despite some controversial papers claiming otherwise) it didn’t really do much. It’s called the Laschamps excursion – you can see evidence for it in a few places, like tree rings and ice cores. But it doesn’t really line up with extinctions or climate change well.
There was a paper a few years ago (based on a tree in New Zealand that lived through it) that attempted to claim the Laschamps event drove a bunch of changes – it, uh, sparked a lot of response from people saying “yeah, no other evidence supports your modeling results.”
Not saying that it doesn’t do anything, it’s just not obvious that it does. Leads to a lot of papers on the topic.
Well, at least the tuatara (tuatarii?) lived through it.
Humans literally lived through it. The goofy paper suggested the Neanderthals didn’t, but that’s just poor science: there’s no evidence there was anything drastic around that time, and the global solar min certainly drove climate changes more because of solar insolation changes (like the Little Ice Age corresponding with the Maunder Minimum).
Turning a magnet upside down doesn’t make it stop magnetting. Nothing to worry about.
“magneting” , I like that!
B^)
There is no “bar magnet” in the earth, rather it is a dynamic and complex process within the liquid interior of the earth.
The point is that the field is unstable and weaker during the long transition phase – at least this is assumed. And that would indeed have an impact on the biosphere.
Yeah, a lot of this is semantic issues, because when you say “pole direction” you’re talking about the dipole component. And during a reversal, the Field’s complex and changing, and so the dipole component can become subdominant. Which means the field drops, but doesn’t disappear.
Pole direction is useful for understanding core behavior, which is insanely complex and poorly understood. Field intensity history is different.
That’s “paleointensity measurements” and we do have data extending into the previous chron: and you can see the field drops around the transition, but it’s actually not anomalously low: scale-wise it’s the same as many other short term changes, about a factor of ten.
The reason it doesn’t decay to zero is exactly what you’re saying: it’s super-complex, and the flip happens due to instabilities and interactions between different elements in the core. In order to drop to zero, they’d need to cancel exactly, and that’s not possible.
“There is no “bar magnet” in the earth” But there is a North pole and a South pole. And I never said “bar magnet”. Do you even magnet bro?
“at least this is assumed.” I see. If you assume something that’s game over? Well, excuuuuse me!
“There is no “bar magnet” in the earth” But there is a North pole and a South pole. And I never said “bar magnet”. Do you even magnet bro?
“at least this is assumed.” I see. If you assume something that’s game over? Well, excuuuuse me!
Yes, and the poles don’t “flip upside down” during a reversal.
We can radio carbon date back to, what, 50 thousand years? And that depends on the severely flawed assumption that background radiation has been perfectly constant for all time (even though we see that literally nothing in nature is constant even in a decade). We have no idea how often these flips happen. Every time they find another old tree everything that has been radio carbon dated gets younger. For all we know these flips happen every ten thousand years. The arrogance of the “scientific” community knows no bounds xD
Paleomagnetism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleomagnetism
Certain magnetic minerals in rocks can record the direction and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field at the time they formed. This record provides information on the past behavior of the geomagnetic field and the past location of tectonic plates. The record of geomagnetic reversals preserved in volcanic and sedimentary rock sequences (magnetostratigraphy) provides a time-scale that is used as a geochronologic tool.
“And that depends on the severely flawed assumption that background radiation has been perfectly constant”
No, it doesn’t. C14 dating is calibrated from other sources. Obviously it’s known the C14 levels vary: in some cases they use the variations to improve accuracy. C14 levels might go up, down, up, down over a series of years, you look for the same up, down, up, down pattern in two things (say, a tree that you don’t know when it was cut down) and now you’ve got an anchor you can extend.
Calibration of “sloppy” methods is exceptionally common in science: in astrophysics it’s the basis behind the distance ladder. You measure close distances exactly using parallax, then move outward using other references.
Obviously you can build up systematic error that way, and you need to take that into account in the overall errors and when comparing stuff.
But there’s no assumption the C14 levels are constant, just that the levels in the living thing were in equilibrium with their reservoir, and that process is very fast (year-scale).
I should point out you sometimes report stuff without calibration because that’s just a pure measurement, and you can compare to other pure measurements. So there you just use 1 value for atmospheric C14. But there you don’t even use the true value of C14’s halflife. It’s just a way of reporting an isotope fraction in a goofy way, not an age. It’s just a definition, not assumption.
Pat you’re just proving my point.
Scientists have no idea how old those rocks are because they can’t radio carbon date them, so their estimated age is based on assumptions that are based on assumptions that are based on assumptions. A single card takes the whole house down. It’s junk science.
Correct, radio carbon dating is “calibrated” from other sources. Every time they find a new source, what happens? Have you seen the trend? All of the radio carbon dated items tend to get, ahem, younger. More junk science. The only thing it is actually valuable for is to say “item A is probably older than item B”. Everything else is assumption based on assumption based on assumption like above.
Junk science that has become a religious cult.
This is literally how systematic error works. It’s totally expected. The exact same thing happens in astronomy when a low ring on the distance ladder gets recalibrated.
There’s a reason why you list statistical and systematic errors separately.
Gosh, from the title I thought it nearly flipped again, exciting.
But there is no hint in the whole article of how far it moved. Looking at the picture, it moved about the same speed and direction for over 20 years now. Meh.
Yeah, but at the same time it moved more in in the past 25 years than it has in the preceding 400 years (most likely much longer; that is just the beginning of records). All in one direction instead of pirouetting around northern Canada. This seems like the start of a “flip,” or perhaps it will slow and start to move back. Maybe it needs to go back and forth a few times in widening and quickening arcs, like swinging a discus or a hammer. Time will tell, we’ve never seen this before
Why would GPS equipment need an update?
I think they mean that generally, as in they get updates from afar, so you don’t have to maintain it yourself like you would for an old sextant or compass. No over-the-air updates or automatic calibrations for those.
Afaik there’s no specific effect on GPS from the Earth’s magnetic field, although I’m sure some issues might sneak in second or third-order
Many GPS systems use more than one sensor to check that their readings make sense.
It’s like estimating, then doing a math problem and seeing if the result is wildly off.
Depending on the equipment, the threshold for “the answer is wrong, try again” when the GPS and compass disagree might cause a failure state when magnetic North moves far enough.
I don’t get why a compass would need an update either. Paper maps might, but they always have. If you look on the side of an (in the UK) OS map, the sort you use if you are going hiking, it will tell you the difference in degrees between magnetic north and the way the grid lines point on that particular map, plus how that is changing over the next few years. Look at your compass and adjust it as they say, and you shouldn’t get lost. If you use an old map those projections won’t reach to the present time, but you’re equally likely to find new roads and buildings that throw you off too.
Maybe, (just guessing here) it might have something to do with additional or less drag on the satellites.
There are true north, magnetic north and multiple grid norths. In general, none of these directions coincide anywhere on the planet except at the origin of a particular datum where grid and true north coincide. Or at least are supposed to. In some instances, the accuracy with which true north could be determined at the time of the creation of the datum must be taken into account.
Depending upon the technology used a compass might or might not need and adjustment. You cannot get directional information from a stationary GPS receiver without a multi axis magnetometer integrated into the system. The GPS FW computes the adjustments based on your location and choice of geodetic datum. And it all becomes a huge can of worms near the poles because of the vertical deviation.
The concepts of geodesy are simple, but the working realities are rather more involved. When a transformation from one coordinate system to another is required, it is often botched badly. Drilling an oil well in the wrong location is very expensive. It’s also happened many times. Some caught and some not. The claimed 150 km error ignores the realities of navigation. The compass is not going to point in the same direction for very far from the initial starting point. The cumulative error depends upon the particular path taken.
This article is discriminatory! What about the South pole?
We lost it to the penguins some time ago.
Will Antarctic base Siple need to be moved?
Never mind, it closed in 1988.
Crust displacement coming up?
Please let it be stuffed crust with asiago on top
I wonder how many airport runways will need to be renumbered?
The more the poles continue to drift the more our the Planet will tilt with it. In the future earth could be tilt like Uranus is if the drift continous its actual path.
But the important question is how does this affect Santa and his elves?
What concerns me more is the impact humans have had by pumping ground water out. We have actually caused the rotational axis to shift some 80cm. The issue is not just the polar flip but where the equator will end up, what habitable contenents will end up being un-inhabitable and what food sources are going to be destroyed as a result.
Pure crack smoke
As ludicrous as it sounds, gemini agrees, between 1993 and 2010, humans pumped approximately 2,150 gigatons of groundwater. This massive redistribution of water mass caused the Earth’s axis to tilt by about 31.5 inches (approximately 80 cm). Fun facts
I wonder if the change of 80cm was the cause of the increase in seismic and volcanic activity.
Sounds like a big steaming pile of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Not really a new thing… airports have had to change the markings on runways indicating their magnetic heading since they started marking runways with the magnetic heading due to this phenomenon. In that way, it’s been “official” for some time now.
“Official” navigation products(maps) are frequently updated to include changes in magnetic declination for any given point on the Earth’s surface.
We’ve been dealing with this for a while now.