Thank you Scientist. That was a better article than the AOL view I caught. It is speeding up, 400+% since the last twenty year mark.
The magnetic field is connected to the solid core, which floats in liquid metal? Whatever it is, even if the core was a perfect sphere, there is a lot of edge movement, Solid core, liquid middle, and solid crust, no longer moving as one. As motion under that much pressure will produce heat through friction, I think we have another Global Warming problem.
I have always heard it was fairly static, little magnetic drift over time. Heat came as plumes, melted some crust from the bottom, and produced volcanos.
If it is moving, the axis of spin is going to be a ring hot spot, for if the pole is moving, so is the core beneath me, I live on the axis. Since 1989, taking 32 kilometers a year as mid range, it has moved 640 Km. This is like a broad river flowing north, of liquid metals, just beneath my feet, and speeding up.
Over the next twenty years, about twice that, if the rate does not increase, and eight times that if it continues gaining speed. Now we are up to 5,000 Km.and 20,000 in the next twenty.
One of the unexplained problems of global warming, most is happening in the Arctic region. This ring of a heat plume from the core moving would be crossing the Arctic. I have heard 8 degrees of warming, the highest on the planet, and no connection with CO2.
Another minor problem, it is passing beheath the New Madrid Quake Zone, which is the largest in America, with a 200 year cycle, that is the reason there are eights and nines on the quake scale. About 1812, from a center on the Mississippi river, it rang church bells in Washington and Boston.
It is a deep mid craton quake, not like those shallow California quakes, San Andres is a whimpy slip sliding fault. The Mississippi River follows this fault, and it is thought it is a spreading center.
The last time few lived in the area, it toppled forests, the Mississippi ran backward, with waterfalls, it lasted for months, serious after shocks.
Study has shown it is a dependable quake, coming every 200 years for the last few thousand.
Now it is the center of our grain lands, power transmission lines, major east-west and north-south highways, railroads, and oil and natural gas pipelines. The river is the main way of shipping grain.
There is no way to measure magnitude over 200 years, but it will be top of the scale, somewhere beyond total distruction, forests toppled, then kicked around. Faults opened and swallowed land, trees, people, animals, and water, then closed as others opened. The descriptions were from tramatised people. The month of aftershocks were beyond Major Quake.
I do have a personal interest, I live a few miles from the river. Sometimes it is almost a hundred foot higher than the city, held back by levees, that would crumble in a quake, just as they did in the minor Katrina three meter storm surge.
This years snows are going to be the spring thaw and flood, the largest in years, when we have had 100 year floods about every five years. A river of molten metal below flowing north, a major Mississippi flood flowing south, lots of natural processes going on.
I feel small.
02 Jan 2010, 2:26 am
