Finally, a solution to our global warming problem.
I can feel the “weakening”, indeed.
Maybe Earth is approaching middle age? Not as attractive as it once was, also not so repellant.
The weakening of the magnetic field has been studied for decades. It even inspired a movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/
Thanks Obama!
-headline from Faux News.
Maybe it’s just God baking off the extra jerks? So does this mean that the presidential race is just going to be Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders? I’d like that.
This is not news. We’ve know the Earth’s magnetic field was weakening for about as long as we’ve been able to take accurate measurements of it. If you look at geological records, it is clear that the Earth’s field goes through cycles where the poles shift, weaken, then flip. We’re approaching another flip relatively soon in geological time. As we near that, magnetic compasses will be less accurate until they’re practically useless… and then North will be South and South will be North, and the fields will rapidly strengthen again. This won’t end civilization. If we’re still using any magnetic orientation for navigation when that happens, then we’ll have to rework those devices. Some animals that rely on magnetic orientation will have problems for a while, but they’ve survived this long with pole flips. They’ll probably adapt.
Just wait til we find out magnetic weakening is caused by renewable energy.
How much can we expect it to weaken? Enough to make going outside uncovered a sure cancer bet? Enough to allow solar flares to wreck havoc on electronics? Enough to allow the sun to blast us all with sustained hard radiation?
And why do we have all these major geologic events (polar reversal, Yellowstone Supervolcano,…) that seem to be overdue at the point where we are finally aware of them?
Y’know, what it probably is is the overmining of them molybdenum magnets.
Is there any danger to life?
Almost certainly not.
Is the Earth’s magnetic field reversing now? How do we know?
Measurements have been made of the Earth’s magnetic field more or less continuously since about 1840. Some measurements even go back to the 1500s, for example at Greenwich in London.
Read more @ The British Geological Survey:
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/reversals.html
Since you seem intent on panicking, I have a lovely bunker to sell you on the Arizona waterfront…
Nuh, uh… I used to read a lot of Apologetics young earth “scientific” papers… They taught me that if you lay a compass on these geologic formations that supposedly have reversed fields the compass reading does not change, thus refuting the basis of your claims.
Nothing to worry about! The atmosphere itself is what primarily shields us from the sun. The magnetic field shields the atmosphere from being stripped away by solar winds, which is why it’s an important thing to have. The lack of a strong enough field over billions of years would turn us into Mars with a thin atmosphere. Presumably, when the fields are extremely weak near the time of the flip, the atmosphere will be slowly stripped away. That is nothing to worry about though either, as the period of weak field will be relatively short and it would take billions of years for the sun’s solar winds to strip away any significant portion of the atmosphere. We’re also gaining atmosphere from geological and biological processes as well. The Earth will be fried by sun turning into a red giant long before we lose our atmosphere or magnetic dynamo. Life has survived and flourished through several pole flips. It will continue to do so.
I remind myself of this whenever I step into the voting booth.
God is punishing us for tolerating neocons and evangelicals.
Almost entirely or entirely because we’re finally able to be aware of them. They were exactly as real ~before~ we could measure those.
Why all the fear of supervolcanoes and global magnetic flux (over which we are powerless) when what we CAN do something about (global climate change due to anthropogenic carbon loading of the atmosphere), we don’t?
Plot twist!
