Coming up: Sun flips its polarity. Cats and dogs, etc.
From space.com article:
…“The sun’s north pole has already changed sign, while the south pole is racing to catch up,” Scherrer said. “Soon, however, both poles will be reversed, and the second half of solar max will be underway.”…
Huh?
I’m not sure where the Earth is in its flip cycle now, but are we too sort of magnetically cock-eyed?
I think there is relationship between the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly and magnetic reversal but I couldn’t find anything explicit. Both are mentioned here in this general article on the earth’s magnetic field.
work on your tannage quicker with the solar maxima.
you might get radio signals that you couldn’t get before.
Will this increase the probability of coronal mass ejections?
Some posit that if the Earth gets hit by one of these that all sorts of Really Bad Things could happen to our global telecommunications network and regional power generation grids.
There was a decent B sci-fi movie with Mathew Modine I think about something like this on Reelz recently called Cat. 8 that was decent. The science was bullshit but it was entertaining and it’s one of those epics where the hero saves the world not once but twice.
We can stop this, if we work together. Come on everyone, it’s
Daylight savings time
It depends on the strength of the event.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that any really long piece of wire can act as an antenna under certain conditions. The electric lines pick up what comes through the atmosphere, and that can overload the system.
That’s how I read the OP cite.
Best regards,
OP
You mean like the one that missed earth by two weeks back in July? Reports indicate it was a solar flare with EMP implications similar to one which hit the Earth in 1859 and melted telegraph lines. Care to think what that flare would have done in this digital world?
As I read the article, it occurred to me that 1) this happens every 11 years and is fairly well understood and 2) the ‘space weather’ actually calms down during this phase of the sun’s cyclic behavior.
It also occurred to me that I am primed for something bad to happen.
I blame the Internet.
And FaceBook.
And old Abbott and Costello movies.
places that didn’t get damaged then were sending signals without battery power.
Yeah, that didn’t happen. Although it’s still worth worrying about.
(If the URL above is still messed up, check the archive for August 3.)
Funny link–the blog sources the story to the Washington Examiner for the source. The story includes fear mongering in the form of a North Korean style “Pearl Harbor” attack on the US (and a link about the threat of “Global Cooling”).
This is just subterfuge to push for missile defense.
The event of 1859 was a colossus of a storm in the 19th Century. But we in the 21st Century have the advantage of satellites and earth observation sites monitoring the sun 24/7 and roughly 2 to 3 days to prepare for it.
This information in turn is used by industries and utilities to mitigate and eliminate damage that could result from a CME.
The geosats I’ve worked on have contingency plans for CMEs which are delivered to the customers. You wouldn’t want to sell a new car without a spare tire and kit would you?
But in an absolute worse case scenario, you can loose the satellite as a result of parametric degradation and failure of the electronic components. In a not so worst-case scenario, the predicted lifespan of the geo maybe decreased from 15 to, say, only 2 or 3 years. But that’s considered a manageable risk by all involved (including the insurance companies, who literally have the final say in whether a commercial company launches a spacecraft or not).
FWIW, the earth’s geo-magnetic field does extend out far enough to give shielding to the geosats. During CME, however, that field gets distorted to the point that the geosats are sitting ducks on the sun side during the storm.
Utilities are also aware of the potential for geo “storms”. They monitor space weather because it of the potential for mass disruption of service (and hence, revenue – this is based on a snippet of conversation I had with a utility vice-president).
I bet Una Persson would be more knowledgeable about this aspect.
In the real world, there was a power outage affecting most of Quebec in 1989 due to a coronal mass ejection.
Power systems can be protected from such events with advanced warning (mostly by disconnecting segments from each other to shrink the “antenna”), so prediction is a big topic for solar physicists.
And the Earth does also flip its poles every so often, in a process qualitatively similar to the one the Sun goes through, but the Earth’s flips are both much rarer and much less regular. There hasn’t been an Earth-flip in all of recorded history-- We’re almost always in the boring dipole phase.
This brings up a question I have had to field from my less scientifically oriented friends: what will happen when the Earth’s poles ‘flip around’?
First, I explain to them that the physical poles won’t suddenly switch from North to South with all of the attendant chaos and destruction. Then I try to explain what the magnetic poles are and how they wander about over the course of time. After a while, most of them wander off somewhat relieved that at least Dr. Inexplicable doesn’t expect certain disaster in the near future from a global pole shift. But some of them stick around and ask questions that I do not have complete answers for.
We appear to know that the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse on a semi-regular basis based upon the record of magnetic striping in the magnetite found on the ocean floor. (Was that enough use of the term magnet for everyone?)
What, if anything, should we expect if such a shift were to occur during the time when Humanity is still living on the surface of this planet? According to most estimations (based on the lack of corresponding disruption in the fossil record), we might experience a problem with the fact that our compasses would gradually become useless but nothing directly life-threatening. Certain species that appear to use the geomagnetic field for navigation (such as pigeons and some whales, I think) may have a problem, but humans will probably muddle on without any worries other than that engendered by the latest media. “Get your pole-reversal safety kit here from www. polereversalsolutions. com” (Honestly, y’all, take a look at the hits that fake website would get.)
I ask the geophysicists here on the SDMB to help me to fight ignorance in this matter.
I am but an humble computer scientist who is willing and somewhat able to understand basic principles. Please help me out here. People worry about everything all of the time now, it seems to me. It would be useful to provide them with some palliative knowledge to stem the flow of panic. The future seems so bleak to so many. That makes me sad. It would be nice if I could alleviate at least one of their fears authoritatively.
Is that certain? From my earlier link:
Well, the biggest consequence of a pole reversal on the Earth is that, while it’s occurring, the field would be relatively weak, which would in turn increase the number of energetic particles which reach the surface. This won’t be an insta-kill of anything (after all, astronauts have survived just fine outside of the effective reach of the Earth’s field), but it might lead to increased cancer rates or something like that.
A sudden shift is actually the best-case scenario, since it would minimize the time spent in this transitional phase. Note that the transitional phase would also be the most chaotic for purposes of navigation: It’s easy enough to just say “OK, from now on we’ll call the white end of the needle “north” instead of the red end”, but during the transition, you’d effectively have a great number of poles, scattered all over the place, so you’d have some regions where “magnetic north” is west-northwest, and some regions where it’s south by southeast, and some regions where it’s due east, and so on.
Me bad. :smack:
It was the only link I could find at the time. Unless it was a brain fart, I remember hearing about it at the time from another source. Crap, they may have used the same original source.
This was my first OP query. What/why is this going on in the suns guts and emitted fields?
The short version: The Sun (or Earth) starts out as a nice simple dipole. But different parts of the Sun (or Earth’s core) rotate at different speeds, and since the material is conductive, it drags the magnetic field lines along with it. So after a while the magnetic field lines start getting really tangled up, leading to the many-poles version. This, in turn, eventually settles out, and untangles back into a dipole, but aligned the other way.
The long version involves both a lot more math, and usually animated diagrams to illustrate the tangling and untangling.