© Scott BogueFrozen Flip
Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa. Such "geomagnetic field reversals" occur every couple hundred thousand years, normally taking about 4,000 years to make the change. The Nevada rocks suggest that this particular switch happened at a remarkably fast clip.
Anyone carrying a compass would have seen its measurements skew by about a degree a week - a flash in geologic time. A paper describing the discovery is slated to appear in Geophysical Research Letters.
It is only the second report of such a speedy change in geomagnetic direction. The first, described in 1995 based on rocks at Steens Mountain, Oregon, has never gained widespread acceptance in the paleomagnetism community. A second example could bolster the theory that reversals really can happen quickly, over the course of years or centuries instead of millennia.
"We're trying to make the case that [the new work] is another record of a superfast magnetic change," says lead author Scott Bogue, a geologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
© G.Glatzmaier/Los Alamos National Laboratory/P.Roberts/UCLA/SPLOn the flip, in record time
Read the full article on Wired.com
The Old Testament says it so it is a witness statement. If the poles of the earth reverse, North will become South and the Sun will appear to set in the east. Thereafter, this will be the west!
The flipping of the earth preserves angular momentum, but there will be affects on the surface as water will not move at the same rate as the planet and earthquakes will be colossal.
As radioactive dating is based on a few decades of observation, it may be that millions of years are truly only thousands. This will then be a more regualr event than every 100,000 years or more.
Look to Aten, the Sun!