The topic of magnetism came up in our class, and in this lecture, my teacher said that the north geographic pole in our compass (or magnets in general) points towards the south magnetic pole of Earth. Adding the fact that our magnetic field flips every hundred thousands of years, how will it affect us and our daily living? The most I can think of is that our current compasses will become obsolete. What are your thoughts?
Thank you for answering!!
In: Planetary Science
Hand held magnetic compasses aren’t nearly as common or as commonly used these days. Knowing which direction is north (or south) isn’t remotely as useful as GPS – and even $30 phones have GPS with updated maps these days.
So in your day to day life, there would be zero impact if the magnetic field flipped in a very short time (which it won’t, we know it takes decades to move)
Migratory birds and fish that use magnetic fields would have ample time to adapt, as multiple generations would pass while the field was moving to the other side.
So, you know how magnets poles point at each other when you play with magnets. The S of one and the N of another spin the magnets as they snap together.
Now… have you ever noticed where the red side of the needle points on a compass? It points north. It’s supposed to point north. It’s useful that it points north so we have an easier time finding north.
But wait a sec… The north side is always looking for a south pole to point at, why is it pointing north?
Oh crap! That’s a SOUTH pole above Canada. It’s NORTH where the penguins are!
So if this confuses or bothers you at all, you’re gonna be VERY happy when the poles flip, because even though we will have to use a Sharpie to change the compass a little, the red north side of the needle will be pointing at a south pole, so now the compass works as good as before, but now its more technically correct.
The time when it happens will be nasty, because for a few 100 years the magnetic field of earth will be very weak during the switching event.
In that time radiation from the sun would disturb all electronics on earth, so we’d need to manually shield every single device.
But once it’s finished there wouldn’t be a really big difference to before except that we’d have to relabel old compasses
The flip won’t cause much chaos for the human world. Migratory birds will be deeply affected.
The bigger issue is that between the flip there is potentially a weakening of the magnetic field. It will still protect US from most solar radiation but it will let more through. Satellites will be more likely to get damaged from the radiation which might lead to some communication or GPS issues for a decade or so after the flip. The earth will lose some ozone to the increased radiation, but that will be recovered as well. We may see slightly higher rates of cancer on the surface, but overall the health of humans won’t be affected too much.
Edit: after further reading and looking at some comments I want to make something clear. While we generally know it does happen and what will happen, we don’t know to what degree the Earth’s magnetic field will weaken. Some estimates make it an inconvenience. Other estimates make it seem like a difficult obstacle for humanity, but one that is conquerable. It never happened before and we don’t know exactly what the core of our planet is made of, so we can’t really model it all that well. We get a range of answers and that’s the best we can do.
So all we really know is that it will happen, you will notice (if it happens during your lifetime), but it shouldn’t be world ending.
Everyone that bought one of those bullshit bracelets will have to buy yearly upgrades to keep up with the transition of course. Kinda like those EA Sports games,.
When the flipped in the past. The evidence shows it happened slowly and at time ended up with multiple poles around the world. Assuming the next will proceed the same way. Where the poles form as they shift will get blasted with solar radiation. So skin cancer rates will increase. But on the plus side the northern lights will spread out over the planet.
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