Per the article below say it did flip, would anything substantive be affected other than compasses and the northern lights?
Earth’s Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly
IIRC there’s a period of low to no magnetic field as it flips; this would allow a fair amount of ionizing radiation to reach the surface and likely cause cancers/birth defects.
The earth’s magnetic field is composed of a dominant dipole field plus other, weaker fields with more poles, 4, 6, etc. It is the dipole field that has a north magnetic in Canada and a south magnetic somewhere in Antarctica.
The current theory as to the cause of the fields is convection currents in the earth’s core. Those currents never cease but they could become more disorganized in such a way as to reduce the dipole field. However according to the US Geological Survey people who studied the fields and established the reduction of the dipole field, the total magnetic energy is just about constant. The energy that was in the diplole field is being shifted over to the higher order fields[sup]*[/sup]. The total field strength is just about the same but it is distributed differently in the various modes. (The Geological Survey work cited is quite old [1968] and there might be newer data available that I can’t find.)
It seems unlikely that the total field will disappear but the dipole field very well could. The dipole field might also merely change polarity rapidly, say over a few hundred years, without going through zero field strength. I don’t believe there is any evidence of serious die offs that coincide with reversals of the dipole field.
*Scientists Confront Creationism, Laurie R. Godfrey, Editor, W.W. Norton, NY, NY. A compendioum of scientific articles on various claims of creationists. The magnetic field information is in Chapter 4 by Prof. Stephen G. Brush, Univ. of Maryland.
Some of the many previous threads on this topic:
From that last thread:
Speculation: All the bipolar people on earth might undergo a dramatic change in mood and thinking. That would apparently include the folks who made the polar bears/penguins ads for Coca-Cola.
Fiction: Check out Ken Kesey’s novel, Sailor’s Song. Besides being a brilliant book, it has a climax that seems to deal with shifting polarity. Aaaaand Og knows what else.
What I want to know is when they will start blaming the USA for it.
Nitpick: The higher modes of a magnetic field are usually decomposed into quadrupole, octopole, hexadecapole, etc. contributions — i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.