Something Flippant this Way Comes

Like a presidential candidate with massive pattern of inconsistency, planetary and solar “polarity flips” – where a magnetic “positive” poll on one side of these massive orbs changes places with the “negative” polarity on the other (sometimes slowly, sometimes really fast) – are standard operating procedure all over the universe. You can no longer be positive that the negative will not become positive, while the negative becomes… er… positive.

Take our own sun for example… about every eleven years, it happens. Rather quickly actually. North becomes south and, of course, vice versa. All that hot, swirling plasma that makes up this searingly hot orb conducts electricity, which in turn generates a massive magnetic field, one that stretches for millions of miles.

“There exists something solar physicists call a heliospheric current sheet. It’s a surface of sorts that juts out from the Sun’s equator, rooted where the Sun’s slowly rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current. It’s a low current, but it’s steady, and it extends, like a sheet, well beyond the orbit of Pluto… It’s around this sheet that the Sun’s whole magnetic influence, properly called the heliosphere, is organized. As Earth orbits the Sun, it dips in and out of the current sheet. Changes in the electrical environment as the planet transitions from one side of the sheet to the other can stir up stormy space weather in our vicinity.

“When the Sun’s poles flips, the sheet will ripple, becoming temporarily very wavy. And that’s potentially good news. The current sheet normally protects the Earth and our Solar System from cosmic rays—the high-energy particles shot out at near light speed by supernova explosions and other violent events that typically threaten the health of astronauts and space probes—by deflecting them. It’s possible that a wavy, crinkly current sheet will act as a better shield against these energetic particles from deep space. [Or not!]

“Astronomers and solar physicists know the flip is imminent because the poles are already showing the first signs of change. Magnetograms [I think my wife gets these] at Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory have been tracking the Sun's polar magnetism since 1976 and monitor the Sun's magnetic field daily. The poles are already out of sync—the north pole has changed its sign and soon the south pole will change its… As this happens, the polar magnetic field weakens and disappears. When the Sun’s material reorganizes itself and the poles return reversed, the magnetic field also returns with the opposite polarity. It will be the sure sign that a solar maximum is behind us and the second half of a solar cycle is beginning.” MotherBoard.Vice.com, August 7^th. Cool, if you understand all this… and cool even if you don’t!

Hey, sun, good work. We’re jealous here on earth at what you get to do… What? What’s that? Earth does it too? Wouldn’t that make our navigation systems and compasses go completely out whack? Would I get motion sickness during the process? Do folks with magnetic personalities have “issues” when the flip occurs? How does it work?

NASA, can you explain? “Scientists understand that Earth's magnetic field has flipped its polarity many times over the millennia. In other words, if you were alive about 800,000 years ago, and facing what we call north with a magnetic compass in your hand, the needle would point to ‘south.’ This is because a magnetic compass is calibrated based on Earth's poles. The N-S markings of a compass would be 180 degrees wrong if the polarity of today's magnetic field were reversed. Many doomsday theorists have tried to take this natural geological occurrence and suggest it could lead to Earth's destruction. But would there be any dramatic effects? The answer, from the geologic and fossil records we have from hundreds of past magnetic polarity reversals, seems to be ‘no.’

“Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal. A reversal happens over hundreds or thousands of years, and it is not exactly a clean back flip. Magnetic fields morph and push and pull at one another, with multiple poles emerging at odd latitudes throughout the process. Scientists estimate reversals have happened at least hundreds of times over the past three billion years. And while reversals have happened more frequently in ‘recent’ years, when dinosaurs walked Earth a reversal was more likely to happen only about every one million years.” Oh, hey, I’m not waiting for that pimped-out earth ride… ‘cause the sun’s about the flip anytime now. Hang on!!!! It’s time!

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes this weird-science stuff is really fascinating!