So I'm in South Bend, Indiana last week "on business", as they say, and I'm chatting with my co-workers at breakfast about the weird weather patterns that have been occurring lately. Apparently, on Thursday, every state in the U.S. (including Hawaii) had experienced some snowfall, with the exception of Florida. Lucky bastards.
Anyway, our breakfast remarks reminded me of a similar conversation I had been having with a high school friend a few months before regarding some weird things that have been happening over the past few years. We talked about the tsunami in Indonesia, the earthquake that we had had in Maryland, the record-breaking snowfall last winter, etc. So naturally we start talking about the idea of some outside force or event instigating these bizarre occurrences. Now I'm not talking about extra-terrestrials or gods or anything, but something more along the lines of drastic geological changes. The reversal of the earth's magnetic field for example.
Now, when I bring this up at breakfast, everyone thinks I've gone batty. They assume I'm talking about something that is about as rooted in evidential support as the idea of the world ending in December 2012. They think I'm predicting some kind of bizarre astrological change brought on by the union of Aries and Gemini on the third moon of Jupiter in the 2nd quadrant of the galactic region of--I can't bring myself to go on. The point is, they thought it was completely ridiculous.
Well I am here to tell you that the reversal of the earth's magnetic field is not only possible, but it has happened before! According to NASA, and other scientists at various universities (like Ronald Merrill, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is featured in the NPR transcript I've created a link for below), the north magnetic pole is constantly changing. In fact, an airport in Tampa had to change the signs on its runways because the runway numbers correspond to the runway's relationship to Earth's magnetic north. Runway 18 (they add a 0 to the end of the number to determine the degree in which the runway is pointing. Runway 0 would be pointing due north, so Runway 18 is pointing 180 degrees in the other direction, aka due south). Scientists spend many days rooting around the North Pole (geographically speaking) looking for the place to which due north has shifted.
I'm not going to go into a lot of the science surrounding the shift in magnetic fields, but the point is, it has happened before (about every 300,000 years), and it will likely happen again. According to magnetic stripes left in the mid-ocean ridges, we haven't had a shift in 780,000 years, so some say that we are overdue. Now I think a lot of the flack that I received for introducing this theory at such an early hour, and in the dining room of the Mishawaka Courtyard by Marriott, was due to the fact that there are a lot of, well, theories out there that claim the world will end because we will no longer be protected from solar winds and magnetic storms from the sun. In reality, while it is possible that we won't be as protected, the worst thing that could happen would be an adverse effect on our power grids. Which, by the way, happened in Quebec in March 1989 as a result of a massive solar flare and --surprise!--they survived. It's actually more likely that the reversal will happen over time, and so we won't lose very much of the protection that we daily take for granted. In fact, maybe if we do experience a massive power failure, it will be like that scene at the end of WALL-E where the power goes out and all of the fat humans on the space shuttle who were previously glued to their computer screens finally realize they are surrounded by other people and begin to interact face-to-face again.
And then of course, there will be the people who don't even notice. I mean, I just realized yesterday that my watch had been set to the wrong time zone for two days.
Sigh.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/14/132934010/following-a-wandering-north-pole
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/29dec_magneticfield/
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