According to engineers from the GPS service, over the past year, the "run" of the magnetic poles of our planet has increased. North is shifting south at an alarming speed of 8 meters per hour …
Eight meters per hour - 180 meters per day, that's 65 km per year. The researchers assure that they are now witnessing the fastest decrease in magnetic field strength in recorded history. What are the chances that in the near future we will also see a change in magnetic poles to a completely reversed polarity (that is, the north magnetic pole will be located above the south pole, and vice versa).
Modern GPS systems have calculated a new magnetic North Pole. It is located almost directly in the north of Canada, near Ellesmere Island, which is quite far from the real North Pole. When measured in degrees, the deviation is about 15 degrees from True North. And while the speed of their movement is only accelerating.
So what does this mean for us? In fact, so far scientists are arguing about at least some unified theory. And they vary from "horror stories" - like the fact that the Earth will stop and all life on it will perish, to completely indifferent "no one will notice anything at all."
So far, it is only known that the Earth's magnetic field periodically changes its polarity. At the moment, the lines of force of the magnetic field literally "run" from the south pole to the north pole, and a point in the southern hemisphere is creeping down into the northern hemisphere.
The Earth "overdue" the pole change
How did scientists determine that the planet has changed its poles more than once? They found this information in the mountains and rocks - it was the direction of the surrounding magnetic field, how they are formed, that allowed the researchers to reconstruct the history of these reversals. According to geologists, the last time the field turned over was about 780 thousand years ago (0.78 million years); the previous reversals took place on a very inconsistent schedule: 0.99, 1.07, 1.19, 1.2, 1.77 and 1.95 million years ago.
Judging by this scale, the characteristic period between "reversals" in the last few million years is much shorter than the duration of 780 thousand years. Those. we can say that at this stage the “coup” was overdue.
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Is it true? The symmetrical structure of magnetic anomalies on either side of the mid-ocean ridges gives us a continuous record of magnetic reversals dating back nearly 200 million years. This shows that the time between reversals is not constant and ranges from several hundred thousand years to many millions of years. As was the case, for example, in the Late Cretaceous, then the reversal occurred intermittently, approximately between 85 and 125 million years ago. Those. the field maintained the same polarity for 40 million years.
This view suggests that trying to predict the future based on the geomagnetic "periodicity" of past reversals is risky, to say the least. Another thing is that current pain relief factors indicate that the strength of the Earth's magnetic field changes during a reversal, because geodynamic theory suggests reversals are likely to occur when fluctuations in cosmic convection of the core weaken and destabilize the dipoles. This forecast is especially relevant in light of the fact that the strength of the Earth's magnetic field is steadily declining, at a rate of about 5% over 100 years. And since we first started measuring it in the middle of the 19th century, we can say that over the past 200 years it has weakened by more than 10%. Is this a harbinger of a reversal?
Scientists are told about this … stones. They can store information about the ancient intensity of the Earth's magnetic field. Those. ancient stones show how they were magnetized millions of years ago.
Soon there will be several "North" and "Yugov" on Earth
So it is the stones that say that each "switching" of polarity occurs when the field is the weakest. And the dips in field intensity are slightly less extreme when they are associated with so-called "time offsets" - periods when changes in magnetization showed that the magnetic poles simply "wandered" quite far from the geographic poles (just like now). Similarly, geodynamic theory predicts that the weakening of the magnetic field seems to be associated with new processes within the very core of the Earth. It is interesting to note that the field in our period was much stronger than at the time of the last "coup". This data may explain why the current polarity interval is longer than the previous ones.
Another interesting detail is that the fields used to behave quite consistently at every turn. The field strength level for each polarity reversal one above the other decreases over time from right to left. Each reversal is preceded by at least 20,000 to 40,000 years of fairly continuous decay of the field strength at approximately the same, very low, value, with a much faster field recovery after the transition. In this context, a couple of centuries of field weakening is not so significant.
So, history tells us one thing: the reversal is not an instant event and our compasses will not point north and south tomorrow. Instead, the geomagnetic field will weaken, and the magnetic poles will start to wander at lower latitudes, and there may even be several ! Those. in different parts of the planet, the compass will point to a specific point on the pole axis. This process can take thousands of years.
Fyodor Lober