Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Magnetic Pole Switcheroo

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Everyone once in a while, say a few hundred thousand years or so, the north and south poles of Earth’s magnetic field switch places. The result: Dogs and cats living together.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner. Rob called me, so would Edo Brein, and asked me what I knew about this crime. We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth. Listen to Who Kill JFK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to this short stuff, the whole gang's here even in spirit. So let's go stuff you should know. Yeah, you put this one together.

This is a good one. We're talking about the magnetic field in specifically the switching of Earth's magnetic pole. And I guess we should just start talking about what the magnetic field of the Earth is, right? Yeah, you kind of can't really get past that one because apparently it seems to be fairly peculiar to Earth to have a really solid inner core, made of, I think, firing a nickel, and that is basically bathed in a bath of molten outer core. Because that molten outer core is constantly roiling and convecting and doing all sorts of

crazy motions, it actually produces a dynamo effect, where a magnetic field is generated. That inner core essentially becomes a giant bar magnet with a North Pole in a South Pole. And that magnetic field radiates from the center of the earth outward into outer space. And it does some pretty cool stuff. One, it prevents high energy particles that are bombarding Earth at all time from reaching Earth generally and killing us just shooting right through your throat and not the other side.

So life can exist on Earth and then less importantly, but more beautifully also creates the auroras. And also why I wear a Kevlar turtle neck. Actually not a dicky really because it gets warm in the summer. Yeah, that's smart. So you've got that bipolar core, you know, we have the North Pole and the South Pole geographically, like we know where those are, we've mapped those out, they're great, everyone loves them. But they really have nothing to do with the actual magnetic poles of the earth. Two different things. The earth's poles, as we will see, they move around a lot because of that molten core is unstable and it moves. That roiling sort

of molten gunk you were talking about is weaker in some places, it's stronger in some places. And you know, you kind of likened it to a pot of water like bubbling and the bubbles like pop and fade away. Same thing is going on there that creates instability and sort of just movement. Yeah, so the suffice to say that the the earth's magnetic field is not constantly stable It's constantly changing and since some spots are weaker than other spots That means the poles can actually move around and they do they wander about there. These it's called excursions and they can move all over the place and as a matter of fact when they What seems to pass what seems to be a threshold, they flip.

And all of a sudden, the South Pole is at the geographical North Pole area, and the North Pole is down in Antarctica somewhere. And it happens. And we've just recently learned about this kind of thing. Yeah, it's called polarity reversal. There's some disagreement among the scientific community about How often this happens how quickly it happens there was a study in 2020 from The scripts oceanographic institute in San Diego

San Diego, right? Yeah, that's the SDE. I didn't think it was South Dakota I said SD, I didn't think it was South Dakota. Definitely. Or Southern Durham, North Carolina. It could have been that one. It's definitely not South Dakota though. I'll tell you that. Yeah, so they had a new model based on 100,000 years worth of data.

And they said actually, these poles are wandering like a lot. It's a real walk about. They're wandering about 10 degrees a year. That is equal to the distance between Atlanta and Toronto or for Aussie friends, Brisbane and Melbourne. Or if you're in London, those are the three places that listen to us basically. Canada, Australia and the UK. Or London and Prague. And that is about 10 times what scientists thought before the study came out. Yeah, the Polkham Wander that far in a year, a year, you just, like when you hear about this,

you're like, okay, that's where I didn't know they could move. Maybe it just kind of gyrates a little bit. No, it can travel from Toronto to Atlanta in a year and back. And it wanders all over the place. It's not like it follows like a set line, because again, the molten inner or outer core, it's roiling. It looks probably a lot like the surface of the sun.

And so all the little spots and weird areas and everything, that's where the magnetic poles actually travel down a plinco set, essentially. But it's a fear plinco set if you can wrap your mind around that kind of thing. All right, well, I'm going to wrap my mind around it and we're going to take a break and then I'm going to unwrap my mind right after this. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so let Addo Brein and ask me what I knew about this

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Yeah, and this was the lava flow in France of which it was named after because of the fossil record I guess that we discovered in the 1960s. And during this excursion, the North Pole went across North America, then said, all right, now I'm going to drop down into the Pacific, or through the Pacific, to Antarctica. And then I'm the North Pole, by the way, and I'm going to stay there and Antarctica for about 400 years and then I'm going to go back up to the Indian Ocean to the actual geographical North Pole.

Yeah, roughly that area. Back to generally where the magnetic North Pole typically is, right? Yeah. That's really fast. 400 years on a geological time scale is like a blink is too slow as a description or analogy. And so the the Lashampus excursion seems to have had some pretty significant effects on the planet. At 42,000 years ago, coincides with a bunch of weird stuff that happened on Earth. There was a lot of glaciers that expanded and all sorts of surprising places. The wind patterns changed globally. The megafauna, a lot of megafauna species disappeared from the fossil records. And so too did the Neanderthals.

That's right. It was a really, really significant period of like surprising and kind of dismal activity in Earth's history. And they have traced this to basically a week of the magnetic field. That it's probable the magnetic field became very weak and that allowed the poles to flip very quickly. And that it wasn't necessarily the poles flipping

that caused all of this weird stuff to happen, but that the magnetic field being weak and probably also let this weird stuff happening. So the reversal of polarity was a symptom just like say the disappearance of the Neanderthals was or the change in wind patterns where they were all symptoms of this weakened magnetic field around Earth. Yeah, you talked about it, you know, sort of acting like a force field against that particle bombardment. That probably weakened it enough that they were bombarded.

The ozone layer was damaged. A lot of UV light is just baking the earth. And it was just bad. Bad enough where scientists obviously are like, well, when is this going to happen again? Because we're in store for something pretty rough. And what they've kind of come out with was, A, we're not sure exactly when it's gonna happen again, because you can't look back,

I think you mentioned earlier, it doesn't necessarily happen in a pattern that you can count on. Yeah, it doesn't seem to. Yeah, so they can't say like, all right, well, here's when it's gonna happen again, but they do think this was a really the Lashamp excursion was sort of a rare, fast thing.

And if it does happen again, it'll probably be over the order of thousands of years. And it's not going to be the kind of thing like most of the other times it happened that was over a much slower time period. The Lashamp was just so fast it wrecked everything. And it probably wouldn't be that bad if it happened again because it would be on a much slower, you know, thousands and thousands of years timeline. Yeah, I mean, tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of years. That's pretty significant as far as differences go, right? And if the sun's kind of like, if it rings a bell, we

talked a little bit about this in the plate tectonics episode where like the magnetic striping at the bottom of the sea is basically lava flows, recording reversals and polarity of Earth's poles. This is very much what we're talking about. So because they think it happens over tens of thousands of years, and if you look back in the fossil record at other times that coincide with polarity reversals, there doesn't seem to have been anywhere near the kind of catastrophic events that came from the Lachampic scursion. They're not particularly worried about it, but we do know that if it did happen on a normal slow timescale, we still have to adapt because a lot of our technology relies on a stable magnetic field.

Yeah, I mean, they have to take that stuff into account. Like, when they look at the fossil record, maybe not much of anything happened because they weren't using satellites and they, you know, didn't have things floating around in space. But there's an area called the South Atlantic anomaly between South American, South Africa, where there a a weaker magnetic field than elsewhere on earth and When satellites and stuff go through there and spacecraft there are issues. They're like can you hear me? Yeah, exactly. Are you still there? And they say in space no one can hear you scream

Name that movie Space balls Name that movie Space balls So they that's an example of like what can happen with a just a somewhat weaker Magnetic field So they would have to account for that stuff ahead of time know it's coming and and Account for it. I think there would be some economic impact But I mean, I think who is at the Cambridge Center for Risk Studies

said that it could be like a six to 42 billion dollar cost for the United States, which honestly, that's a chunk change when you look at, you know, budgets of the United States. But that's a day. Yeah. A day it's it's not like I mean, that's a lot of money obviously, but it's not like that would wreck the American economy I depends on how long it went on for you know well Yeah, I guess I mean if they didn't get up and running within a few hours, that could be yeah, I can add up It could add up speaking of knowing it's coming. I want to go ahead and stem the tide of emails I know that Chuck was talking about alien by the way everyone Who could josh these space balls?

One other thing Chuck because the disappearance of the Neanderthals coincides with the the weakening of the magnetosphere and probably bombardment of UV radiation and in ions Yeah, maybe right that the Neanderthals really did melt it You might be on to something, man. That's an old one. Anything else? I got nothing else, J.M. Well, then short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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