Expert: Tom Whiting - 11/22/2008

Question
HI, I've heard last week from my English literature professor that the North and
the South Pole will change places someday, because that's a phenomena that
happens every 20.000 years! is this true or false? Thanks in advance for
resolving the confusion

Answer
Hi Elmedin,
Partially.  Although the magnetic pole flip is certainly not instantaneous, and we're not quite sure of the period....some say every 20,000 years, some say every 40 - 50 thousand years. It's thought that magnetic pole migration could take several hundred years to flip (or slowly migrate to the other pole side of the Earth is perhaps a better way to look at it).  The sun performs this magnetic pole flip every 11 years, so a full cycle is actually 22 years, (from plus to minus, then back from minus to plus). And yes,
it correlates to the sunspot cycle too.

Most of us are not concerned about the Earth's magnetic pole flip...(it's a magnetic pole flip, not a geological pole flip, which of course is impossible as we are a spinning 'gyroscope')....because the
Earth has flipped it's magnetic poles many times in the past history,
and WE are still here, as is all current life, so obviously it's not the doomsday scenerio that science fiction writers would have you believe.  (Besides, what could anyone do about it anyway? Nothing.)

What are some of the inconviences?  First a normal compass would not
work properly until the reversal of poles is complete. But in this
modern day....satellites, GPS systems, etc. we don't rely on Magnetic
North any more, so no great loss there as far as navigation goes.
Northern lights by incoming solar radiation and particles will
migrate with the migrating magnetic poles, so Aurora will be visible down in the equatorial regions of our planet for that period of time.
And since the Earth's magnetic field partially protects us from incoming charged particles,(along with the atmosphere itself) for a while there won't be as much protection from those incoming ions, so more mutated life may be expected on this planet. However, as I said above, life and us humanoids have survived many of these magnetic pole reversals before, and we're still alive and kicking....
so it's more an inconvenience than anything else.

Baffin Island is currently the location of the North Magnetic Pole
but it appears to be moving faster away from that spot every year,
so this may, or may not, be the beginning of a magnetic pole flip.
We'll have to just keep an eye on it. In any case, don't lose any
sleep over it, as it's happened many times in the past, and we're
still here.
Hope this helps,
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie, PA  USA