It didn't take long for someone to jump on the "it must be climate change" bandwagon.

Brian

I think it might all be connected to the millions of tons of coal extracted in the US for power generation, mostly so people could watch the climate change movie "the Day After Tomorrow" on TV, over and over and over….

Or it's because of "fracking" for oil exploration!

(Just joking, I really have no clue)

The planet did not come with a safety warranty, and there have been MANY catastrophic climate events due to meteors and asteroid strikes, large comets coming too close, ice ages, etc all through history. The last ice age was only 50,000 or so years ago. Where I live the land was covered in 3 km thickness of glacial ice. Much less here today. 8^)

Like our Canadian federal environment minister McKenna said this year, "disposable plastic drinking straws are our nation's biggest environmental waste challenge." You couldn't make it up…..

I'm looking forward to Neil sharing snapshots of (89959) 2002 NT₇ in February.

89959 is a 2km diameter asteroid which at first was said to have a 1 in 75000 chance of hitting planet Earth. Fortunately now it's got close enough for a accurate assessment of its trajectory the probability has dropped to one in a million.

2km may not sound very big but the asteroid has enough momentum to obliterate the whole of North America! No need to worry about Global Warming then…

Dave

SteveW is likely right. Nobody knows how quickly the poles swap, when it does occur. It could be another 20 thousand years, yet, but nothing like making preparations and/or small practise runs!

On average, 4 or 5 reversals per million years.

Who jumped and where?

Could we then have Christmas in the summer?

Yep, right. We have only known about for around forty years after they found the rather long crack in the Earth’s crust, on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Among the finds were that the US and Europe are moving apart at a steady rate due to volcanic deposition at the rift. Checking the rocks either side of the rift showed changes in magnetic pole orientation about every 200,000 years. I think they reckon the last change was around 180,000 years ago. So the next could be sometime in the next 50,000?

Of course, the seasons would be altered around.  Question might be will humans, as we know ourselves, be here when it happens?  I have my doubts if the human race keeps raping the planet at an ever increasing rate,  Climate change could be nature’s way of freeing the planet of our interference!

Edited By not done it yet on 12/01/2019 20:01:31

It's a magnetic field in a liquid magnet, it's going to do stuff

As long as the field doesn't stop we'll be fine

If it stops we will be, quite literally, toast

edit: I used it for navigation whenever the gyro conked out but it's only any good at lower latitudes

At higher latitudes it was too variable for reliable navigation without confirmation (The stars)

Edited By Ady1 on 12/01/2019 21:28:54

What have we ever enjoyed that could be classed as stable?

Tunnocks caramel wafers, still the same size they used to be

Mars bars are about the same size as milky ways now, even the lettering is bigger than the thumb of chocolate you get inside

..rather depends where you start. I used to make compass landfall flying over the channel pretty spot on but would doubt my ability to nail it transatlantic <g>

The best way to stabilise the magnetic pole is to decide exactly where we want it and build all the power stations there and wire everyone up along a line of longitude – Oh, and train pigeons to only fly North-South so the magnets in their heads doesn't pull the flux sideways. It's going to get a lot worse when all the cars are electric…

<exit stage left>

pgk

Interesting article.