Wonky magnetosphere?

[Outlaw Yogi]

Spoze the 'Doomsday 2012' crowd will be on the verge of panic soon. Not because 2012 is less than a year off, but because the magnetosphere has weakened, allowing pole shift/drift to accelerate.
So what's going on, other than the current recalibration of navigational measurements, is probably anyone's guess, and the speculative chatter is accordingly confused and superstitious.

These charts only show mag pole drift upto 2005, so a bit out of date, but were the best I could find, so the current acceleration of shift/drift aren't shown, but they do illustrate the phenomena at play.





This is one of the few theories on the topic not delving into the realm of doomsday superstition.

Global warming could change Earth's tilt
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... -tilt.html

[Outlaw Yogi]

My personal suspicion/theorising, considering solar flares temporarily weaken the magnetosphere, connects dots to this sort of stuff ...

Nasa scientists braced for 'solar tsunami' to hit earth
02 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... earth.html

The Daily Telegraph disclosed in June that senior space agency scientists believed the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013.

EDIT ADDITION -
Easily understood background material:
2012: No Killer Solar Flare
http://www.universetoday.com/14645/2012 ... lar-flare/

[Bizarro Monk]

Dear Mr Outlaw. Aren't we due for a full magnet pole switch soon. This may be the beginning of that process. I would have thought that the fields and points of the poles has more to do with the core of the earth, the alignment of the iron atoms as the flow of the core changes than any effect from a solar storm. I am just a monk and know very little about this world as I focus on the life after this one.

[Bizarro Monk]

Not because 2012 is less than a year off, but because the magnetosphere has weakened, allowing pole shift/drift to accelerate.

Dear Mr Outlaw, the poles are not drifting because the magnetoshpere is weakening. It is because the core is changing. Here is an article with a theory that is not proven yet.

Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/ ... 2010-12-24

Finding Santa Claus's home at the North Pole is easy on a globe—just look for the point on top where all the lines of longitude meet. But that is just the "geographic" North Pole; there are several other definitions for the poles, all useful in different scientific or navigational contexts. Among the many north poles, let us rejoice that Santa Claus did not choose the magnetic pole for his home, for he would have to spend as much time moving as delivering presents.

The north magnetic pole (NMP), also known as the dip pole, is the point on Earth where the planet's magnetic field points straight down into the ground. Scottish explorer James Clark Ross first located the NMP in 1831 on the Boothia Peninsula in what is now northern Canada, and with the planting of a flag claimed it for Great Britain.

But the NMP drifts from year to year as geophysical processes within Earth change. For more than 150 years after Ross's measurement its movement was gradual, generally less than 15 kilometers per year. But then, in the 1990s, it picked up speed in a big way, bolting north–northwest into the Arctic Ocean at more than 55 kilometers per year. If it keeps going it could pass the geographic north pole in a decade or so and carry on toward Siberia. But why?

One compelling explanation appears in the December 21 Eos, the weekly transactions of the American Geophysical Union. In their Eos article (subscription required), and in a longer paper published earlier in 2010 in the Journal of Geophysical Research–Solid Earth, Arnaud Chulliat of the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and his colleagues venture that a twisting molten plume beneath the Artic could be the cause:

According to some recent models, plumes of less dense fluid form at the inner core boundary and subsequently rise within [a cylinder] whose central axis is the Earth’s rotation axis. Such plumes undergo a strong helical motion due to the Earth’s rapid rotation, a phenomenon also observed in laboratory experiments with water. In the core, helical plumes advect and twist the magnetic field lines, forming what scientists call "polar magnetic upwellings."

Those upwellings, unloaded into the Arctic mantle, could produce intense patches of magnetic activity on the sort of decade-long timescales needed to explain the NMP's sudden acceleration. (The authors compare these patches to a kind of terrestrial version of sunspots.) And magnetic field measurements show dramatic shifts near the New Siberian Islands that seem to fit the bill.

"What happened under the New Siberian Islands at the core surface is that the rate of change of the magnetic field changed by a large amount during the 1990s," Chulliat says. That activity, he and his colleagues have found, could account for a large portion of the NMP's acceleration. But whether magnetic field changes under the New Siberian Islands and the speeding north magnetic pole ultimately arise from a twisted plume of fluid rising through the core remains unproved, Chulliat and his co-authors note. A resolution of the mystery will await better modeling, along with more data from satellites monitoring the Arctic's magnetic environment. The necessity of satellites, interestingly enough, is a consequence of the pole's recent movement—as the NMP drifts farther out to sea, it becomes harder and harder to reach the region with magnetometer-equipped aircraft.

[Outlaw Yogi]

Dear Mr Outlaw. Aren't we due for a full magnet pole switch soon.

Nobody really knows. Geological records indicate Earth has semi-regular pole flips every 300,000 to 400,000 years or so, and we haven't had one in 780,000 years, so supposedly over due, but then another ice age is supposedly due also, so much of the science seems speculative, there are no certainties.

This may be the beginning of that process. I would have thought that the fields and points of the poles has more to do with the core of the earth, the alignment of the iron atoms as the flow of the core changes than any effect from a solar storm. I am just a monk and know very little about this world as I focus on the life after this one.

A reasonable ussumption and probably correct most of the time, but knowledge of the machinations is still uncertain.
Its true reports of the outer core have supposedly been behaving erratically in recent years, but report of the core having reversed spin direction have been debunked.

What is known for sure is that solar winds from coronal mass ejections [CME] temporarilly reduce the strength of our magnetosphere and that our sun has recently had a magnetic pole flip indicating it is nearing a solar maximum.
On occasion solar flares from CMEs reach out so far into the solar system, the sun's and Earth's magnetic fields link up allowing a direct transfer of energy from the sun to Earth. The visible result being Northern Lights and Southern Aurora.

Magnetic poles tend to be in constant drift of roughly 10 miles per year, but recently drift has accelerated to 40 miles per year.

Bizarro (=DT?) if you have an tech info or postulations regarding the cause of mag pole drift acceleration, I'd be interested to see it.
EDIT ADDITION - just noticed the scientific american blog post above ... thanks.