Maps of the historical movements of the North and South Poles of Earth

submitted by magnora7 from earth.rice.edu

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[–][deleted]  (3 children)

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    [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

    Interesting points. It's not AC lines I'm worried about though, it's stuff like MRI machines with 6+ Tesla magnetic fields and superconducting research magnets that are even more powerful.

    To make a bar magnet, you put a magnetizing material under an even stronger magnet, and that causes everything to polarize in the same direction and thus have a large-scale magnetism.

    I wonder if the very strong magnets we use on the surface of the earth, creates small magnetic domains in the earth in the local area where it's happening. Enough of these magnetic domains will eventually affect the Earth's field as a whole, and the easiest way for Earth's magnetic field to change is to change orientation (as opposed to changing in strength).

    So it's possible we're causing the poles to move. I wonder if anyone is investigating this. Seems as least as plausible as anthropogenic climate change...

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      Good points. I think an interesting measure too would be how homogeneous Earth's field is. There can be lots of conflicting magnetic domains pointing in opposing directions that cancel each other out. But if they all align facing the same way, the field becomes stronger. I imagine this happens sometimes too