Is Earth's Magnetic Field About To Flip? | Random Thursday

somewhere in China around 200 BC some guy was let's just say out in the field somewhere maybe he was a farmer maybe he was a miner or something but anyway he finds a rock it's fairly long elongated rock and for whatever reason he ties it to a string maybe he was making a toy out of it maybe he was making some kind of weapon but for whatever reason that he did this he found that when he was dangling this rock by the string it always found a way of pointing in the same direction the rock of course was a magnetic lodestone and this was the world's first compass except they didn't actually use it for navigating this was the age of spirits and demons and gods so this was actually used for divination and Fung Shui and that kind of thing they called it a South pointer I guess because they were more interested in it in the south direction in the north direction but to their credit the Chinese were the first to use this for navigation about a thousand years later around 1000 AD and then it took another couple of years for it to spread into Europe in the Middle East this of course opened up the seas and opened up trade routes and helped us to navigate the world better than we'd ever done it before but we still never really understood how it worked is William Gilbert of England that first theorized that it works because the world acts like a magnet in his book on the magnet magnetic bodies and the great magnet of the earth though he still didn't quite understood how it worked earlier theories guessed that the entire planet was just made out of magnetic rock but the problem is that the deeper you go down and the hot of the rocks get the more they kind of lose their magnetism so it was Joseph Larmour in 1919 that was the first person to propose that maybe we have some kind of self-sustaining dynamo inside the planet that's creating and generating this magnetic field alarmers theory is proven true in the 1940s by Walter L saucer and Edward Bullard when they came up with a dynamo theory of magnetism which actually put all this into numbers and made it all makes sense scientifically and whatnot because at this point we had a better understanding of the inside of our earth and we already knew that we had a solid iron nickel core at the center of our earth about the size of the moon and then we had an outer core about the size of Mars that was liquid metal and the Dynamo theory suggests that while the outer core rotates around the inner core Coriolis effect takes over and creates convection currents that generate this magnetic field at the same time we were learning just how important this magnetic field is in terms of protecting the earth from deadliest of the sun's radiation and keeping life you know safe and protected down here on the surface and we also learned that it has a tendency to flip sometimes and then it may be doing it again soon in the long list of weird coincidences that made life on this planet possible one of the things that has to be right up at the very top is the strong magnetic field that protects us from the Sun actually just talked about this on Monday of the four rocky planets in our solar system the earth is the only one that has a strong magnetic field the other three all have no magnetic field in common something else they all have in common no life we also don't have technology technology that we have our whole infrastructure our whole lives built around right now it's actually heavily reliant on the magnetic field so in some ways we need our magnetic field more now than we ever have before right now we have satellites swarming all around the earth providing communication and navigation and whatnot all of those have delicate components that could be fried without a magnetic field to protect them now of course if we lost all of our GPS satellites which is kind of like saying ATM machine there's always compasses to fall back on for navigation but the problem with that is that the magnetic north pole is moving a lot now we've known since the 1800s that the true north and magnetic north have always been off by a little bit the magnetic north has always been closer to the Canadian Arctic and we've known that the pole has a tendency to drift which is why the NOAA has always released their world magnetic model every five years so that we can keep track of where this thing is moving around let's make sure that shipping services and military organizations have an accurate model for their navigation purposes but beginning in the mid-1990s it started moving a lot faster it went from moving about nine miles per year to about 34 miles per year and just last year in 2018 the pole actually crossed over the International Dateline in to the eastern hemisphere and ironically this shift has actually moved the magnetic pole closer to the true North Pole but it's been moving so fast that the NOAA had to release their magnetic model year early they liked it's not supposed to go out until next year they went ahead and did it this year because it's been moving that much that it's causing that much of a problem so why the sudden movement scientists aren't sure one theory is that there's a high-speed jet of liquid iron underneath the surface of Canada that's scooting everything over towards Siberia but is this cause for alarm outside of navigational issues you know is this is this indicative that there's something actually wrong going on down there is it time to panic that's a joke of course it's always time to panic I should rename this channel existential dread with Joe look this might not mean anything it might just be some movement in the outer core that's causing an accelerated drift that's all but it could also mean the polls are about to flip and cause global chaos because the magnetic field has flipped in the past like a lot like once every 500,000 years or so we know this because of magnetic lines we've found in lava at the bottom of the ocean because as the lava comes up through those fissures in the tectonic plates it cools and the ferrous metals kind of line up with the magnetic field so you can pull that apart take a look at it see which direction they're pointing and see which direction the magnetic field was pointing itself and through this method scientists know that the pole hasn't flipped in around 750,000 years so we're long overdue for a good old switcheroo now it's thought this happens because those convection currents in the outer core are just a little bit unstable and every once in a while the little vortex can spin off here and there cause it to become even more unstable it goes into a little bit of a chaotic state before it reorients itself and finds stability again it's just good old fluid dynamics and if there is a stray iron current going underneath Canada pushing the North Pole toward Siberia it could be part of that instability that could be the beginning of this thing starting to flip so panic not yet when we talk about flip we're actually talking about over geologic time so it's not like you would just wake up tomorrow and up as down left his right cats or dogs you know this would take several thousand years like if the poles started flipping when Socrates was alive it would just now be finishing so there's time to adjust and that doesn't mean this is without its dangers an unstable magnetic field would probably be severely weakened meaning more radiation from the Sun would come through meaning more potential for for cancers and genetic defects the good news though is that there hasn't been any real correlation between magnetic pole flips and mass extinctions that we've so it's possible that it won't actually affect us as much as we think it might although there's still research going on in this department what might be more profound is like I was talking about before the effect it would have on our satellites and possibly our energy grids it could leave us much more vulnerable to coronal mass ejection events like the Carrington event that could actually shut down our electrical grids so there's a couple of ways this could go down one is that it just might get a little bit more chaotic and more chaotic over the next thousands of years until eventually everything just kind of reorient itself and it flips into that opposite direction or the other possibility might be just that the pole moves slowly and meanders across the surface of the earth until it eventually gets to the other side meaning we could possibly see the North Pole somewhere in Africa at some point the fact of the matter is the pole may have been in the process of flipping since the very beginning of human civilization we just don't know any better as humans we have such a limited perspective of time when we look at these long term geologic processes it's kind of like we just get a snapshot of it and then try to put together the entire story it'd be like pulling a frame out of a two hour movie and then trying to piece together the entire plot so even though we've actually met the magnetic field to extreme accuracy especially thanks to the ISA swarm mission we don't know if this is normal or if this is an aberration or is there even any such thing as normal time will tell and we've got plenty of it so no need to panic or at least don't panic about this global warming will kill us all along before this does tell me what you think do you think this is gonna be a big deal do you think we're actually in the middle of a flip do you think that it could take thousands of years do you think that it could just reorient itself or if it could just travel and you might go to the North Pole and in the Mount Kilimanjaro someday talk about in the comments t-shirts available in the store answers with jocano slash shirts show the world your dynamo and they will love you for it haha what does that mean I don't know go to answers you know Joe come flesh shirts almost got it thanks so much for watching if this is your first time here Google thinks you like that video so you might want to watch it cuz Google will get mad if you don't and if you do you like that one there's other videos down here I suggest you go check them out and if you like those please do subscribe I've come back with videos just like this every Thursday and every Monday alright that's it for now you guys go out have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll catch you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 302,952

Rating: 4.9200001 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, earth's magnetic field, magnetic field reversal, magnetic north pole, north pole moving, compass, magnetic north, navigation, existential threat, NOAA, World Magnetic Map, SWARM survey, William Gilbert

Id: 6KIcTHfVHFQ

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019