Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. The whole gang's here, even in spirit. So let's go stuff you should know.
Uh yeah, you put this one together. This is a good one.
We're talking about the magnetic field, and specifically the switching of Earth's magnetic pole, and I guess we should just start talking about what the magnetic field of the Earth is, right, Yeah.
You kind of can't really get past that one, because apparently it seems to be fairly peculiar to Earth to have a really solid inner core made if I think iron and nickel, and that that is basically bathed in a bath of molten outer core. And because that molten outer core is constantly roiling and convecting and doing all sorts of crazy motions, it actually produces a dynamo effect where a magnetic field is generated. That inner core essentially becomes a giant bar magnet with a north pole and
south pole. Yeah, and that magnetic field radiates from the center of the Earth outward into outer space, and it does some pretty cool stuff. One, it prevents high energy particles that are bombarding Earth at all time from reaching Earth generally and killing us, just shooting right through your throat. And out the other side, so life can exist on Earth and then less importantly but more beautifully also creates the auroras.
And also why I wear a kevlar turtleneck actually not a dicky really because.
It gets warm in the summer.
Yeah, that's smart.
So you've got that bipolar core.
You know, we have the North pole in the South pole geographically, like, we know where those are.
We've mapped those out.
They're great, everyone loves them, but they really have nothing to do with the actual magnetic poles of the Earth. Two different things. The Earth's poles, as we will see, they move around a lot because of that molten core is unstable and it moves. That that roiling sort of molten gunky we're talking about is weaker in some places, it's stronger in some places. And you know, you kind of likened it to a pot of water like bubbling
and the bubbles like pop and fade away. The same thing is going on there that creates instability and sort of just movement.
Yeah. So that's suffice to say that the Earth's magnetic field is not constantly stable. It's constantly changing. And since some spots are weaker than other spots, that means the poles can actually move around, and they do. They wander about. It's called excursions, and they can move all over the place. And as a matter of fact, when they what seems to pass what seems to be a threshold, they flip and all of a sudden, the South Pole is that the geographical nor Pole area and the North Pole is
down in Antarctica somewhere. And it happens. And we've just recently learned about this kind of thing.
Yeah, it's called polarity reversal.
There's some disagreement among the scientific community about how often this happens, how quickly it happens. There was a study in twenty twenty from the Scripts Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, San Diego, Right, Yeah, he said, sd I didn't think it was South Dakota.
Definitely, or southern Durham, North Carolina.
It could have been that one. It's definitely not South Dakota though, I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
So they had a new model based on one hundred thousand years worth of data and they said, actually, these poles are wandering like a lot. It's a real walk about. They're wandering about ten degrees a year. That is equal to the distance between Atlanta and Toronto. For Aussie friends, brisbe in Melbourne or if you're in London. Those are the three places that listen to us basically, sure Canada,
Australia in the UK, or London and Prague. And that is about ten times what scientists thought before the study came out.
Yeah, the pole can wander that far in a year. A year. You just like, when you hear about this, you're like, Okay, that's that's where I didn't know they could move. Maybe it just kind of gyrates a little bit. No, it can travel from Toronto to Atlanta in the year and back, and it wanders all over the place. It's
not like it follows like a set line. Because again, right the molten inner or outer courts roiling, it looks probably a lot like the surface of the sun, and so all the little spots in weird like areas and everything. That's where the kind of like the magnetic poles actually traveled like down a plinko set essentially, but is severear plinko set. If you can wrap your mind around that kind of.
Thing, all right, Well I'm gonna wrap my mind around it, and we're gonna take a break, and then I'm gonna unwrap my mind right after this. All right, so we were talking about this thing is it's really holland these poles are moving around and they can actually flip.
And the last time that happened.
Was about forty two thousand years ago in what's called the La Champ I guess the La Champ excursion, great man name, and this was the lava flow in France, of which it was named after because of the fossil record I guess that we discovered in the nineteen sixties. And during this excursion, the North Pole went across North America.
Then said, all right, now I'm gonna drop down into the Pacific or through the Pacific to Antarctica, and then I'm the North Pole, by the way, and I'm going to stay there in Antarctica for about four hundred years, and then I'm going to go back up to the Indian Ocean to the actual geographical North Pole.
Yeah, roughly that area, back to generally where the north magnetic north Pole typically is. Right. Yeah, that's really fast. Four hundred years on a geological timescale is like a blink is too slow as a description or analogy, And so the Lashapis excursion seems to have had some pretty significant effects on the planet at forty two thousand years ago, coincides with a bunch of weird stuff that happened on Earth. There was a lot of glaciers that expanded and all
sorts of surprising places. The wind patterns changed globally, the megafauna, a lot of megafauna species disappeared from the fossil records, and so too did the Neanderthals. It was a really really sick, magnificant period of like surprising and kind of dismal activity in Earth's history. And they have traced this
to basically a weaken in the magnetic field. That is probable the magnetic field became very weak and that allowed the poles to flip very quickly, and that it wasn't necessarily the poles flipping that caused all of this weird stuff to happen, but that the magnetic field being weakened
probably also let this weird stuff happening. So the reversal of polarity was a symptom, just like say the disappearance of the Neanderthals was, or the change in wind patterns, where they were all symptoms of this weakened magnetic field around Earth.
Yeah, you talked about it, you know, sort of acting like a force field against that particle bombardment that probably weakened it enough that they were bombarded. The ozone layer was damaged, a lot of UV light is just baking the Earth, and it was just bad, bad enough where scientists obviously are like, well, when is this going to happen again? Because we're in store for something pretty rough, And what they've kind of come out with was a we're not sure exactly when it's going to happen again
because you can't look back. I think you mentioned earlier. It doesn't necessarily happen in a pattern that you can count on.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to.
Yeah, so they can't say like, all right, well here's when it's going to happen again, But they do think this was a really the La Shamp excursion was sort of a rare, fast thing, and if it does happen again, it'll probably be over the order of thousands of years, and it's not going to be the kind of thing like most of the other times it happened. It was over a much slower time period. The La Champ was
just so fast it wrecked everything. And it probably wouldn't be that bad if it happened again, because it would be on a much slower, you know, thousands and thousands of years timeline.
Yeah, I mean tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of years. That's pretty significant as far as differences go, right, And if if it sounds kind of like if it rings a bell. We talked a little bit about this in the plate tectonics episode, where like the magnetic striping at the bottom of the sea is basically lava flows recording reversals in polarity of Earth's poles. This is very
much what we're talking about. So because they think it happens over you know, tens of thousands of years, and if you look back in the fossil record at other times that coincide with polarity reversals, there doesn't seem to have been anywhere near the kind of catastrophic events that
came from the La Shop excursion. They're not particularly worried about it, but we do know that if it did happen on like a normal slow timescale, we still have to adapt because a lot of our technology relies on a stable magnetic field.
Yeah, I mean they have to take that stuff into account. Like when they look at the fossil record, maybe not much of anything happened because they weren't using satellites and they you know, didn't have things floating around in space. But there's an area called the South Atlantic Anomaly between South America and South Africa where there is a weaker magnetic field than elsewhere on Earth, and when satellites and stuff go through there in spacecraft there are issues.
They're like can you hear me? Are you still there?
And they say, in space, no one can hear you scream.
Name that movie.
Space Balls exactly.
So that's an example of what can happen with a just a somewhat weaker magnetic field. So they would have to account for that stuff ahead of time, know it's coming and account for it. I think there would be some economic impact, but I mean I think who is at the Cambridge Center for Risk Studies said that it could be like a six to forty two billion dollar cost for the United States, which honestly, that's chump change when you look at you know, budgets of the United States.
But that's a day, yeah, a day, So it's.
Not like uh.
I mean, that's a lot of money obviously, but it's not like that would wreck the American economy anything.
It depends on how long it went on for you know, well, yeah, I guess so. I mean, if they didn't get up and running within a few hours, that could be you know.
It could add up, It could add up.
Speaking of knowing it's coming, I want to go ahead and stem the tide of emails. I know that Chuck was talking about alien By the way, everyone.
Who could Jos baseballs.
One other thing, Chuck, because the disappearance of the Neanderthals coincides with the weakening of the magnetosphere and probably bombardment of UV radiation and ions. Yeah, maybe right that the Neanderthals really didn't help. You might be onto something. Man, that's an old one. You got anything else?
I got nothing else? JM.
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