I know. This sounds like a plot of a 1950’s scifi movie. But it is real. From my view, our localized corner of the solar system is now different than it used to be and changes in the magnetic interactions are evident everywhere. First we have the interplanetary magnetic field that took an abrupt dive in October 2005 and has not recovered since and remains at very low level:
click for a larger image
Then we have the recent discovery that the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.
We have a solar cycle 24 (driven by the solar magnetic dynamo) which can’t seem to get out of the starting gate, being a year late with forecasts for activity from it being revised again and again.
And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth’s magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars.
Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We’d do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate. – Anthony
From NASA News (h/t to Geoff Sharp)
Dec. 16, 2008: NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth’s magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to “load up” the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”
The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance.
Right: One of the THEMIS probes exploring the space around Earth, an artist’s concept. [more]
“The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself,” says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li’s colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says “1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that’s a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible.”
The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open. The cracking was accomplished by means of a process called “magnetic reconnection.” High above Earth’s poles, solar and terrestrial magnetic fields linked up (reconnected) to form conduits for solar wind. Conduits over the Arctic and Antarctic quickly expanded; within minutes they overlapped over Earth’s equator to create the biggest magnetic breach ever recorded by Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
Above: A computer model of solar wind flowing around Earth’s magnetic field on June 3, 2007. Background colors represent solar wind density; red is high density, blue is low. Solid black lines trace the outer boundaries of Earth’s magnetic field. Note the layer of relatively dense material beneath the tips of the white arrows; that is solar wind entering Earth’s magnetic field through the breach. Credit: Jimmy Raeder/UNH. [larger image]
The size of the breach took researchers by surprise. “We’ve seen things like this before,” says Raeder, “but never on such a large scale. The entire day-side of the magnetosphere was open to the solar wind.”
The circumstances were even more surprising. Space physicists have long believed that holes in Earth’s magnetosphere open only in response to solar magnetic fields that point south. The great breach of June 2007, however, opened in response to a solar magnetic field that pointed north.
“To the lay person, this may sound like a quibble, but to a space physicist, it is almost seismic,” says Sibeck. “When I tell my colleagues, most react with skepticism, as if I’m trying to convince them that the sun rises in the west.”
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Here is why they can’t believe their ears: The solar wind presses against Earth’s magnetosphere almost directly above the equator where our planet’s magnetic field points north. Suppose a bundle of solar magnetism comes along, and it points north, too. The two fields should reinforce one another, strengthening Earth’s magnetic defenses and slamming the door shut on the solar wind. In the language of space physics, a north-pointing solar magnetic field is called a “northern IMF” and it is synonymous with shields up!
“So, you can imagine our surprise when a northern IMF came along and shields went down instead,” says Sibeck. “This completely overturns our understanding of things.”
Northern IMF events don’t actually trigger geomagnetic storms, notes Raeder, but they do set the stage for storms by loading the magnetosphere with plasma. A loaded magnetosphere is primed for auroras, power outages, and other disturbances that can result when, say, a CME (coronal mass ejection) hits.
The years ahead could be especially lively. Raeder explains: “We’re entering Solar Cycle 24. For reasons not fully understood, CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the storm gets underway. It’s the perfect sequence for a really big event.”
Sibeck agrees. “This could result in stronger geomagnetic storms than we have seen in many years.”
For more information about the THEMIS mission, visit http://nasa.gov/themis
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vukcevic asks:
Could it signal that I am going to be a millionaire?
Don’t ask inane questions. Propose a mechanism! Any such mechanism, in my view, has to involve removing more energy from the sea than is being input and has been stored there during some period in the past.
“Second, the Earth already bulges around the equator.”
I believe that bulge is water. When you begin to lower the sea level and deposit the water at the poles, it would be like an ice skater bringing in their arms. Since Earth is mostly liquid (with a thin crust on top), it can not flip but it should always spin on the axis of the center of mass.
The problem comes in when you have a land mass that “anchors” the ice off center of the rotational axis. That should cause some migration of the true polar axis.
While it can’t “flip” it can migrate and there is some reason to suspect that this has happened in the not too distant past. The climate of Eastern Siberia was different in the last interglacial than it is now and it supported life forms that could not exist there today. If the mammoth were still here, it would find a very difficult time finding enough to eat. And we find specimens of that species now in deep permafrost among grass where now there is none. It was not likely deep permafrost when the animal lived there.
There are some indications that the North polar rotational axis moved from somewhere between Greenland and North America to its present position at some point in the past. If you move the pole more toward North America, Siberia becomes more temperate. The climate there then makes sense. Also, the buildup of ice is slow and so the crust can subside and there would be some rebound of the crust in the equatorial region as the sea levels slowly drop. But when it melts, it melts quite quickly and the crust can’t adjust as quickly (it is still adjusting today from the last ice age). That is when I would expect to see a change in polar axis … if there is significantly uneven melt.
In the last ice age the Earth built up the ice caps slowly over a period of 100,000 years but lost nearly all of that ice in only a couple of hundred years.
These changes in mass distribution can possibly result in changes in the location of the Earth’s rotational axis.
Here is a Time Magazine article from 1955 on the subject.
The thing is that if the poles were open ocean, we probably wouldn’t have ice caps. The South polar ice would probably break up and drift away or maybe never form at all if ocean currents kept it warm. The North pole only freezes because it is bounded by large continental land masses that keep the ice trapped. 2007 showed what happens when wind currents push polar ice out in a direction where there is no land to catch it.
So how much of magnetic migration is really migration of the rotational axis? I don’t believe all of it is, but I believe a good amount of it is.
While the article was written before plate tectonics was accepted, the notion that the rotational axis will respond to mass redistribution is sound. And quite a lot of mass gets redistributed during ice ages and particularly during melts.
lgl (11:27:18) :
Dr. Svalgaard will disapprove, which is fine by me, but the good explanation for the temp dip in 1900 is the solar minimum at the time, visible here: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/GEOMAG/image/aassn07.jpg
For those who both understand and accept the work of Henrik Svensmark, the 1900 cold snap is not difficult to explain.
I posted this today on my blog just to poke some Ecofascist in the eye….
“Although the eastern edge of our continent has been a passive margin for the past 200 million years or so, it won’t be that way forever. Sooner or later all Oceanic crust cools to a point where it is too dense to float on the mantle anymore. (There is very little oceanic crust on earth older than about 200 million years, whereas continental crust is so buoyant it can last for billions of years before being eroded or partially subducted.) When oceanic crust begins to sink, the sinking becomes part the engine for a new convergent plate boundary. The oceanic crust off the coast of the Carolinas is more than 200 million years old and will likely start to sink into the mantle in the not-too-distant geologic future, perhaps in the next 10-20 million years.Once this process starts and the crust under the Atlantic Ocean begins to subduct beneath the Carolinas, our Coast will change from a passive to an active margin. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and a brand new mountain range will leave their mark on the land once more.”
Written by Kevin G. Stewart and Mary-Russell Roberson
Ok, so they didn’t mention water rising, but that’s part of what will happen. It may be that they failed to mention it because it’s not so much a matter of our sea level rising as it is our coastal land mass sinking. [end]
———————————————
Al Gore may get his wish after all, but it won’t be from his stupid Global Warming horse pooh! Since I live in the Blue Ridge mountains, I may someday have beachfront property. Cool huh?
Keep up the good work here. It’s important that the other side is told. I will NOT allow the Ecofascists to tell me how to live!!!
In 1997, Gregg Braden wrote Awakening to Zero Point, sucessfully explaining the various conditions which indicate a shift in our experience here on Earth. The decreasing magnetics was one of his observances.
He revealed that in the midst of uncertainty, this is a period of growth for human consciousness, which if understood and implimented well, could redeem our history and enlighten our future. Use it or lose it.
~^~
I wonder who the guy that dies will be. In every episode, there is some dude nobody knows and who likely has never been on TV before, who dies at the hands of some strange phenomenon. We used to lay bets at the beginning of each episode as to who would die and by what mechanism. Loved that show to death.
Unlike most threads here, this one is making me stupider. 🙁
So this solar minimum thing, we have the same heating factor, but we got a whopping hole in the magnetosphere and a thinned ionosphere.
Sounds like at night, somebody left the barn door open and the place is freezing. Or like stripping the insulation out of the walls on your house, it just never heats up like it used to.
It sure is getting cold. No arguments there.
As far as the earth being a battery, the earth can also be looked at as an atom. The moon is the earth’s electron, just like an electron in the orbit of an atom.
How small are we in the grand scheme of life? I believe that we make up something larger that we cannot see.
For any of you wizards out there, what happens to an electron after the atom is split?
All things equal, on a par.
let me be where the wild things are–
Here is where I long to be:
loose in quantum anarchy!
Chaos theory is my pride!
Stochatic series be my bride:
Let there thrive the fudged evasions
of partial differential equations
Let
and be the Wandering Cause on side
Let there thrive the fudged evasions
of partial differential equations.
Set Fortuna’s wheel ride
and let the Wandering Cause on our side
Invoking the spirit of stochastic chaos apparently did me wrong.
One mo’ time:
_______________________
Let there thrive the fudged evasions
of partial differential equations.
Set Fortuna’s wheel aride
and let the Wandering Cause on our side!
Totally off topic, but I thought some of you may be interested in the latest bit of indoctrination that I ran across today: Santa goes Green.
I posted about it here, while we were being blasted by sub-zero temps again:
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/santa-goes-green/
’tis the season.
Merry Christmas!
RICH:
It depends on the energy carried by the electron. It could collide with a cloud of positive particles surrounding to another electron and be deflected softly, if its load of energy is low, or strongly deflected if its load of energy is high.
Jim Arndt (09:57:10) :
Usoskin, Solanki and Kovaltsov
Have you read their papers and any thoughts. They don’t quite see it as you do.
We should certainly permit them to see things differently. The main sticking point is whether solar activity currently [or perhaps a cycle or two back] is/was at an all-time high [at least in the last 11,000 years]. I don’t think so.
Richard Sharpe (17:04:59) :
vukcevic asks: P.S to Could breach in the Earth’s magnetic field signal a new Maunder minimum?
The ‘breach’ happens when the interplanetary magnetic points north. It does that every few hours. Perhaps, that info could also calm some of the alarmists and frightened people that have posted their fearful toughts here.
crosspatch: no, the landmass bulges as well — and most of the earth’s mass is viscous, plastic mantle (although mars is also an oblate spheroid and its tectonically dead).
you also cannot move the north pole rotational pole axis unless you impart a massive amount of force onto the Earth that has an angular momentum component. the impactor that caused the ejecta which later cooled and formed the moon almost certainly caused such a shift. the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth (plus minus a little precessional wobble that cancels out over time) is also evidence of the earth getting slammed by impactors that carried a considerable amount of force. all of those events were also sufficient to completely sterilize the planet of any life which was getting started (that’ll give everyone else on this thread who is terrified of magnetic field breaches something else to have sleepless nights over).
the north rotational pole was not near greenland anytime recently (although i don’t know my geology well enough to know if greenland was near the north pole — which is a different topic entirely and has to do with plate tectonics, not the spin axis of the Earth changing).
you just can’t get the spin axis of the Earth changing by changing the gross morphology of the earth without a (massive) outside force acting on it. all the ice shifting here or there doesn’t matter. if you have a sphere rotating about an axis in zero-g and it morphs into a dumbell (along any arbitrary axis) it will still maintain the same axis of rotation.
we also know that the Earth was at one time much hotter and the poles were completely melted, and we don’t need to involve crazy rotational precession ideas to explain that.
Jim Arndt (09:28:44) :
Here is an interesting link that finds at least LOD is a proxy for temperature but I can’t say it is part of the cause. They did the study to use because of the fisheries and catch rates seem to follow LOD. I have never compared LOD to the geomagnic but hey it might be interesting.
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm#TopOfPage
.
Interesting. They are missing though factors with the atmospheric explanation.
This suggests that the recent extra slowing shows that the icecaps are growing:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/The_Ice_Caps_are_Growing.pdf
crosspatch; I understand precession and changes in the obliquity of the ecliptic, but not what you mean when you refer to a shift in rotational axis. The Time article to which you refer from 1955 was prior (I think) to understanding plate tectonics. Antarctica got its coal when it was much further north of the south pole, and then it moved to the pole. Not, as the article says, that the pole moved to antarctica. Also, the magnetic north has moved about 685 miles in the last 150 years, precession describes a circle of 13-15K miles (off the top of my head) in 26K years, 4.5 vs. ~.5 miles per year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenpolitics/international/3302619/Al-Gore-alleges-climate-change-misinformation.html
Gore said the world is approaching a tipping point that will see an acceleration in efforts to fight climate change
A huge public misinformation campaign funded by some of the world’s largest carbon polluters is aimed at disputing the scientific consensus on global warming, former US Vice President Al Gore has claimed.
“There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10m a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community,” Gore said at a forum in Singapore.
“In actuality, there is very little disagreement.”
Gore compared the campaign to that of the millions of dollars spent by US tobacco companies years ago on creating the appearance of uncertainty and debate within the scientific community on the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes.
“This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science,” Gore said. “We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion.”
After the release of a February report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of the world’s top climate scientists, that warned that the cause of global warming is “very likely” man-made, “the deniers offered a bounty of $10,000 for each article disputing the consensus that people could crank out and get published somewhere,” Gore said.
“They’re trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools,” he said.
He said Exxon Mobil Corp, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, was one of the major fuel companies involved in attempting to mislead the public about global warming.
Last year, British and American science advocacy groups accused ExxonMobil of funding groups that undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. The company said the scientists’ reports were just attempts to smear ExxonMobil’s name and confuse the debate.
Gore said as awareness of the urgent need to address climate change grows, the world is fast approaching a tipping point that, when crossed, will see an acceleration in efforts to fight the problem, and urged businesses to recognise that reducing carbon emissions is in their long-term interest.
China could cut its carbon emissions without jeopardising economic growth if it used new technologies that do not emit greenhouse gases, he said.
Gore cited the mobile phone industry as an example of a business that does not need to burn fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
“There are ways to leap-frog the old, dirty technologies,” he said.
China, like other developing nations, fears that plans to cut carbon emissions would cripple its economic development.
But Gore said the Chinese government needed to be more aggressive in fighting global warming because the country’s chronic water shortage was tied to climate change.
“China has a great deal at risk,” he said. “The water crisis is very closely related to the climate crisis.” Millions of people in China, which is on course to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, have no access to clean drinking water.
Chinese scientists said last month that rising temperatures are draining wetlands at the head of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, China’s two longest rivers, choking their flow and reducing water supplies to hundreds of millions of people.
While top Chinese leaders have “expressed themselves forcefully” on global warming, the comments do not “necessarily lead to immediate changes in the region,” Gore said.
Harold Ambler (17:34:04) :
For those who both understand and accept the work of Henrik Svensmark, the 1900 cold snap is not difficult to explain.
http://www.physorg.com/news148751093.html
Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London has also studied possible links between solar variability and modern-day climate change.
“This is a careful piece of work by Jon Egill Kristjansson that appears to find no evidence for the reputed link between cosmic rays and clouds,” she commented to BBC.
“It’s supporting other recent work that also found no relationship,” Haigh added.
Paper: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/7373/2008/acp-8-7373-2008.html
If we had been monitoring Earth’s Magnetosphere with the THEMIS Probe for the past Two Millennia alone, we might have witnessed such activity present itself MANY times over again. The period during which we have kept records, and the even shorter amount of time during which we have been monitoring such aspects of Earth, are so relatively minute in comparison to all of our Planet’s History, that accurate Patterns can hardly be recognized nor Cycles determined from such.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — A new study supports earlier findings by stating that changes in cosmic rays most likely do not contribute to climate change.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217075138.htm
crosspatch (09:38:55) :
Something I have wondered about that is a little scarier to me over the eons …
What I have wondered is if during a glaciation, particularly when continental land masses are near the pole and situated asymmetrically around it … if the huge accumulation of ice could cause the planet’s wobble to become exaggerated.
That has been considered (by Milankovitch IIRC or maybe someone else) and the effect calculated. It has a small, near trivial effect and can not cause the physical poles to swap.
The moon is a stabilizer of our poles. If there were no moon, we could have pole tumbles, but with the moon it is much harder. I doubt that any physical pole shift is possible. Magnetic pole shifts are a different matter and happen due to the chaotic nature of the fluid flow and magnetic dynamo inside our planet.
When a magnetic pole shift happens, we do not get zero magnetism then new poles, we get chaotic magnetism with multiple N and S “poles” for a while until a more uniform field is re-established. There is a patch of N type field showing up in the S hemisphere off S. America IIRC. The “Bermuda Triangle” has also shown odd magnetic polarization anomalies and may explain the reports of odd compass behaviour.
The biggest issue for the polar ice wobble theory is that during an ice age the ice is deposited more or less symmetrically about the poles. Ice can form over water and fill in between asymmetrical land masses. The movement of mass from the equator to the pole does have an impact on day length, though it is small.
I have noted that Leif doesn’t think much of the possible relationship between solar activity and climate. Can I deduce from that that he thinks that the apparent correlation between the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age is just coincidental. And if that is so what caused the Little Ice Age?
It is quite interesting to note that the Earth`s magnetic field has got the massive breach and causing effects on the earth itself. There is no doubt that
the earth`s massive breach is widening through centuaries. But all these changes causing concern to the Interior of the Earth and the activities within the Basaltic mass. These changes will directly affect the Earthquake activity and more perticularly the Tectonic Forces underlying. Because, if there is any change in the Interior to which the Tectonic activities are related, will affect the movement of the Shields( Continents), and thus the whole tectonic Theory
would be changed. Because, the original base of the Tectonic Theory is the Earth`s Magnetic field, So if this field is widening due to massive breach, then
what would be to the continents ? is the biggest question. What would be the movement of the Continents and their cycle? Thanks.