Look HERE items #11 & 12. It's official per the USGS web site!! We're not going to die tomorrow! We don't have to send a nukulur bomb to the core of the Earth!! We don't have to obtain unobtainium!!

Oh, wait a minute. They are part of the gubmit wide cover up so all us unwashed masses types have to die while the gubmit elite survive. :roll:

Oh, I sooooo confused! :roll:

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

Someone has a worse case of Friday-Afternoon-Stuck-At-Work than I do!

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

This is a fantasic animation.

Yup.
It's neat that the magnetic south pole is sitting off of antartica! 8)

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

Actually it's a case of stuck waiting for some who is quite late for our appointment. Must be a logjamb in traffic. I'm looking out the window and the street is all but deserted. I bet there's a semi flipped out on I-75.

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

I liked it too but wonder where they got the data for the 1500's, 1600's and 1700's. IIRC the magnatometer wasn't invented until 1835 or there abouts.

They must have figured it out from the geologic history they developed digging in the dirt. :shrug:

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

Looking at that chart makes you realise just how normal the Earth's magnetic fluctuations are. No doubt there will be 'other' interpretations though.

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By asking questions we sometimes get the wrong answers, from wrong answers we learn to ask the right questions.

I don't understand the animation... Can someone explain?

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Dr. Booblishmoops,
andrew.ender@gmail.com

PHD in Tziflingology
PHD in Astronomy and Astrophisics (awarded by Dr. Booblishmoops)
MASTERS DEGREE in HIR(Highly Intellegent Remarks) (also awarded by Dr. Booblishmoops)

It illustrates the shifting of the magnetic poles over the last few hundred years.

Possibilities:
-extrapolation of current data
-measured in ground layers(?)
-from compass data of things like ship's logbooks(?)

Just guessing.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

To be specific, I think it's a map showing how far off of true north a magnetic compass would read, given your position. So, park yourself in, say, the British Isles, and you'll see that your compass starts out reading 10 degrees too far to the east in 1600, slowly changes to almost 30 degrees west by the 1800's, and then comes back to less than 10 degrees west by today, continuing to head toward reading east again.

Yeah. I think ships logs of declanation were figured in the 1600s using stars and the like.

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

One of the main ways they measure this is to take core samples of magnetic rocks. For example, in a lava flow from a volcanic eruption the magnetically succeptible materials (iron, etc.) will align themselves with the local magnetic field. So by taking samples of lava flows from around the world, and dating the layers through some other method, you can get a pretty good estimate of the direction of the magnetic field at that time.

There may be other ways, but I know that using this is the method they've used to track the pole-shifts over geologic time scales.

The lines you see connect the dots on the surface of the Earth that have the same declination(*) values. The declination lines in the animation change with time to reflect the displacement of the mag poles.

(*) The angular difference between the true north and the magnetic north.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

man, we were supposed to die today and no one told me?

what was supposed to happen?

Well...actually, it was about five days ago but the gubmint coverup caused a delay so the Zetans could invoke their hyperendoplasmicretriculum, thus adversely affecting the chronosymplasticinfindibulum causing a short circuit in the hypergoogleplex. So the end of humanity will actually be a week from thursday about 2:35pm eastern elbow time. :roll:

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

oh! well! thanks for the heads up, i'll just get my flux capacator running and i'll be off.. ciao!

Phwew, so I still have time to fix my headlight switch and put the dash back together? That's great.

Back to science for a minute.... after decades of believing the Earth was more like giant bar magnet I'm all messed up.

Doesn't that field look there's an electric current doing laps around the core? And it's wobbling. How? .... now my brain hurts. Somebody fix it.. :-?

There was a great show on discovery channel that highlighted this, we even have a thread on it somewhere around here...

Take a peek at the 'dynamo' effect.

The magnetic field does flips, and it is recorded in those rock layers some one mentioned above. Every 200,000 years or so (lately, we're overdue for a flip) the north and south magnetic poles switch places. It's due to the flux lines 'tangling' through a process that isn't entirely understood quite yet...

[edited several times, I really should use the preview function...]

__________________

Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

It looks like the south pole is heading for Australia....

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http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...630/prj:6/.png

I wonder if we filled their pouches with iron pelllets, the kangroos would flip over when it got there. PETA would hate it, but it would be funny anyway.

No! No! No!...You are not allowed to have a sense of humor or make fun of poor, opressed wild anamules. You must be serious and humorless per rule #3 in the PETA manual. #-o

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker