Memorycemetery

I didn’t write here for a while. It’s not what I forgot all about it - but rather its in human’s nature: we loose interest in things with time passed. I was also busy with other things, and that should be enough of excuses. I was thinking about writing here more though, and it looks like time has come - I got a comment today on one of my posts, with an unknown kind reader asking me if I’m about to publish something else any time soon. I can’t call it a fame :), but deeply touched by this attention and interest. There’s also an urgent issue related to cows I can get out of my mind. So putting things aside, I’m about to roll up my sleeves. Let’s take a fact out of popular science, cook it with other ingridients, spice up with presumptions and hopefully make another post somebody else can enjoy reading as I enjoy writing.

Let’s start from a bit afar. Our planet have 2 magnetic poles, North and South ones, right? It’s a dipole. Below is the still image from Earth magnetic field, taken from the satellite video you can find here…

Yes, I know it has nothing to do here. But its beautiful and so I did.

… It shifts every now and then, and magnetic field sometimes even “flips”, causing global catastrophes and over nasty things I don’t want even to think about. Just to give you a hint of an idea, have a look at other planets in our Solar system - such as Venus (which rotates in an opposite direction to all the other planets, therefore it was flipped upside down) and Uranus (which rotates on its side). It happened to Earth 780,000 years ago on a smaller scale, it happened before that, and though some people are advocating theory what it will happen again pretty much soon - even coming up with dates, such as December 21, 2012, based on Mayan prophecies and end of the Mayan calendar, it is an event which is hardly possible to predict on the basis of pure science. Why it happens and when it would is beyond my expertise or the scope of this article. If you are interested in, please refer to “Why Earth’s magnetic Field flip-flops” article, or September 26 issue of “Science” magazine.

The resources desribing Mayan prophecies are quite an interesting read. One resource is going as far as setting a timer… at the moment of writing it said 1527 days, 12 hours, 30 min., 2 sec. left for the Age of Transition to begin. It’s hard not to believe it. The poles are going o shift about that time, and it looks like the LHC scheduled their start after repairs at roughly the same time :), should you like to know has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth yet, you can visit this one.

The thing is, our North pole after 400 years of relative stability is shifting its location, and this movement rapidly accelerates. See the illustrations below:

The movement of Earth’s north magnetic pole across the Canadian arctic, 1831–2001 (Geological Survey of Canada)

Wander of the North Pole of Earth’s Rotation From 1900 Through 2000. Units are in Arc seconds. (0.1 Arc second = 10.127 ft, or 3.087 m). The inset shows the direction that we think the pole will travel (see black dot at each end of red arrow) and suggests that it will move about one degree to 89ºN, 60ºW

This image is taken from the detailed article on the subject

What about the South Pole?:

The movement of the South magnetic Pole

Don’t you think it’s simply amazing? The North magnetic Pole is moving with the recent speed of over 40 km a year…

What I wonder is: how many people/ships without GPS etc get lost, because their compass doesn’t point there they think it does? How birds can find their they home if they follow magnetic field grid? Do they fly somewhere else instead?

And one more thing to consider. As the last observations of Google Earth have shown, cows automatically point to the North, because they have their own in-built compasses aligning them with the Earth’s magnetic field.

What will happen to them if the Earth will flip?

Boris Kislitsin

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