Will the Earth flip?

Message 743 of 2721

Scientists discovered that every 10,000 years or so, the Earths magnetic field flips. North becomes South and South becomes North.

Does the field flip or does the Earth flip? An ice cube in a glass does not spin right away when the glass is rotated, instead it holds it's position. Might Earths core stay put along with the Magnetic field in the same way?

A spinning basketball with a lump of clay on top will turn over so that it's weight will fall below the "equator". Could Earths massive ice caps pull the Earths rotation off axis in a similar way? Could global warming save us?

Will the Earths magnetic field fail and allow us to be cooked by space radiation?
Can we survive? How could we defend ourselves?

I say the field will fail, the planet will flip, the people will flip too.

What do you say?

Links to consider::
BBC News: view link
LECTURE: view link
DISCOVERY: view link

Keywords: "Seafloor spreading", "Plate tectonics", "paleomagntism",

posted by MisterScience

Replies 1 - 10 of 12

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Let's hear it for going down under.

posted by LenRobertson
11 months ago

What a great message to think about for the New Year, lol...

Great theories, but I have a monkey to throw into the wrench. True those paleontologists found snails whose whorls went one way at one time and then another way “proving” that the Earth’s poles had reversed. And true that the Earth’s poles move around due to the liquid molten part of our core encapsulating the solid dense iron core is constantly in (slow) motion.

But (don’t you hate it when somebody says that), that liquid molten part of our core encapsulating the solid dense iron core constantly in (slow) motion is the cause of plate tectonics. You know continental drift?

In other words some of those pesky snails and rocks could have lived in the Southern hemisphere at one time...and the Northern hemisphere at another.

Whoops, there goes another great conspiracy theory, lol...

posted by LifeLoveLaughter
11 months ago

p.s. I doubt that the gyroscopic action and momentum of the earth’s spin would allow the Earth to "flip"; astronomers have never seen such an occurrence, the math says so, and I can't make my f'ing gyroscope fall over...

posted by LifeLoveLaughter
11 months ago

Hmn, ten thousand years - there were people on this planet ten thousand years ago, and they haven't seemed to flip. Perhaps we are safe. If not, what do you plan to do about it.

posted by pattiwatt
11 months ago

Remember Atlantis!!! It flipped…

posted by denjolly
11 months ago

Inertia would dictate the rotation and orientation will remain the same.

posted by CelticAutumn
11 months ago

Mister Science , your top with the lump of clay on it will topple over because of the earth's gravity . Where is the gravity coming from to cause the earth to topple from its icecaps ? Methinks that it could not topple from its own gravity .

posted by Dirck
11 months ago

Of course the earth will flip again, the poles reverse themselves a geologic history illustrates many times. I doubt we will have to worry much about radiation, though, for it should be sudden and we will "all fall down" precipitously.

Perhaps we are about due and that's why the Mayan calendar doesn't go past 2012, ya think?

posted by GothamGal
11 months ago

Isn't it one of the theories to explain the Permian epoch extinction of almost all the large land animals?

posted by yichel
11 months ago

The magnetic field flips, not the planet. I can't remember the program, but I did see something within the past year on this subject.

I take the results of all computer modeling with a grain of salt, but in the program I watched, they ran a model of the fluid dynamics of the Earth's interior and the magnetic field created. The magnetic field was stable for thousands of simulated years, and then flipped. On closer examination, the flip takes about 200 years in real time, and begins with a growing number of magnetic anomalies, just as we're beginning to see now.

The Earth over the next few decades may become dappled with positive and negative zones, and hot spots at the boundaries where the cosmic and solar wind will be able to reach the surface.