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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2006-10-29, 01:02

Have any of you watched the NOVA episode about Earth's magnetic field reversal(s)? Here's the link to the website about it. Imagine an upcoming time when the Earth has 8 magnetic poles and when the planet receives upward of twice as much cosmic radiation. How would magnetic field reliant travelers navigate? Very interesting thought.

AND, if anybody can find the album that has the song that Judith Edelman is singing in the episode I will thank you very much. Mostly I figure that it is a custom tune that I will be able to score eventually.

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
Captain Drew on Twitter
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BarracksSi
BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope.
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Washington, DC
 
2006-10-29, 07:57

The first time I remember seeing something about this was on a Canadian-produced math/science show that ran on PBS during the school day (anybody remember the teacher wheeling out the TV once a week at a specific time for a specific show?). Something about the core reversing direction, reversing the magnetic field.

One of the more curious animal effects they illustrated was of ground-dwelling bacteria that use the magnetic field to orient themselves. After reversal, they effectively "believed" that up was down, and rather than moving deeper, they would come to the surface, dry out, and die.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2006-10-29, 09:13

And it isn't just bacteria.

There's a section on the NOVA site about the possible impact the field reversal might have on animals, notably creatures that use the planet's magnetic fields for navigation. Birds, sea turtles, even whales.

Quote:
Kenneth and Catherine Lohmann of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and their team have shown through many experiments that during their 8,000-mile migration around the Atlantic Ocean, young loggerhead sea turtles can detect not only the field's intensity but its inclination, the angle at which magnetic field lines intersect the Earth. The turtles use these two pieces of information, which vary at every point on the planet's surface, as navigational markers that help them advance along their migratory route (see Figure 2).

Sometimes this navigational ability can serve its practitioners only too well. A mystery long bedeviling marine biologists is why otherwise healthy whales beach themselves, often in large groups. In the early 1980s, a British biologist named Margaret Klinowska first noticed a correlation between where whale strandings tended to occur along the coasts of England and where magnetic lineations written into the seafloor intersect those coasts. (These lineations, or anomalies, are different from those produced by the main magnetic field.) Joe Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues later showed a similar association on the east coast of the U.S.

Whales, it seems, follow these magnetic lineations during migration (see Figure 3). "If that's your game plan, and you get off track, and you follow a sharp magnetic anomaly that curves and runs into the coast, bang, you end up on the beach," says Kirschvink. Because whales are very social, if the leader makes this mistake, so does its entire pod, hence the mass strandings.
There's more on the website.

.

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
Captain Drew on Twitter
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2006-10-29, 14:11

I want to know why NOVA eps are $8 on iTunes.
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billybobsky
BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope.
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Inner Swabia. If you have to ask twice, don't.
 
2006-10-29, 14:56

Someone's got to pay for them...

And it certainly can't be the tax payer, because they don't want none of it...
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