The magnetic North Pole always wanders, but it’s been doing a lot more of that in the last four years. Enough that they need to update the World Magnetic Model a year early, instead of the usual five year intervals. It crossed the International Date Line last year in its trek from Canada toward Siberia.
I hope something exciting comes out of this. Maybe not quite The Core-level excitement, but auroras at 45° would be cool. Unfortunately, it’s probably nothing more than an interesting science fact.
Could it be that alignment closer with the rotational axis of the Earth is just less stable than further away. It’ll zip by in two decades and then settle down a bit in Siberia?
If found the verb choice “warns” on that headline very funny for several reasons.
First off, “quicker than expected” means “less than a 100 million years” so it’s not exactly an immediately urgent matter.
Secondly, the human race is totally off the hook on this one. We didn’t do it! It’s not our fault! You don’t have to quit using hair spray or anything like that.
And thirdly, if Saturn’s rings disappeared next Tuesday, it would certainly be kind of sad in the abstract, purely on aesthetic grounds, but it’s not like it would be any kind of threat to the human race, or to life on Earth in general. (Assuming they disappeared from some natural process, and not because they’d been assimilated by the Borg or something like that.) There would be no need to assemble a team of misfit but heroic astronauts to blast off into space–thousands of times farther than Man has ever gone!–to, I dunno, set off a nuclear bomb*, something something, somebody bravely sacrifices himself in the process, hooray! the rings of Saturn are restored!
*I guess we could blow up one of the smaller moons.
It might be or might not be. Reversals seem to happen every 200,000-300,000 years on average and it’s been 780,000 since the last one, so we’re “overdue” strictly based on averages. But that’s kind of meaningless for phenomena like this; it isn’t a regular cycle. Weird things are definitely happening with the magnetic field, but we don’t have enough understanding of the system to make a guess if this is the start of a switch or not.
Also note that a switch is estimated to take between a few hundred years to a few thousand years, so don’t expect to see this in your lifetime even if this is the start.
