What I wanted to ask is, if earths magnetic pole now would manage to flip in a really quick timespan (let's say less than 5 minutes), would that have any effect on electronic equipment, and if so, why?
I mean I would think that the would not be any effect. After all, electronic equipment do not rely on earths magnetic field in some way. How would they?
Or would there be some effect on electronic equipment if the flip happened in less than 30 seconds?
Well, you might need battery power. The atmosphere may shield partially, buy solar wind can destroy satellites. Don't know if GPS would work, but would certainly cause much grief.
On the night side you would see global aurora for a few minutes if the sun was suitably active. Most satellite electronics will survive all but the nastiest solar flares.
Gauss meters, hall probes and magnetic compass devices and the like would not be too happy. And all the shims for NMRs would need to be redone since the Earths field would be the opposite polarity and perhaps not at the same dip angle.
If you flip it fast enough then you could induce damaging currents in long conductors. That has happened in the past with te most powerful solar flare storms over Canada eg in 1989. See for example:
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But unless the Earth's field had a similar rate of change to that experienced in an extreme magnetic storm I think most things would take it in their stride. Big continental power grids with long wires would be the most likely to drop out.
The only I can think about are the variosu HDTV CRT studio monitors that required different alignment depending on the hemishpere they were intended to be shipped.
The electricty network would no doubt crash, due to the DC saturation of transformer cores.
Currents flowing in natural gas pipelines could cause some significant havoc.
Hey, geographic north and magnetic north would finally be correct (north is actually the South pole, that's why the North compass pole is attracted to it).
Tim
--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
Based on magnetic fields frozen into old lava fields, during a magnetic pole flip, first the major poles get weaker and weaker and the subpoles (such as the South Atlantic Anomaly) become real poles.
During this period there might be four, six or even more local poles, so navigating with a magnetic compass would be a challenge, especially when these poles may move with a considerable speed, making paper maps obsolete quite quickly :-). During this period, Aurora Equatorialis might be observed, when the solar wind hits the atmosphere close to the local pole.
Finally, the flipped main poles get much stronger than the subpoles, so the minor poles are just magnetic anomalies.
Excellent, I wanted to post this little factoid. I 'discovered' this when I was trying to use a compass match up sets of Helmholtz coils. Drove me 'nuts' for a day or so.
If you are alive during the next flip, it may be that the *least* of your worries may be the effect on electronic equipment.
The Earth's magnetic field acts like an invisible protective shield that "steers" the solar wind -- and the high energy particles contained therein -- around and away from the surface. During a reversal, the position and intensity of this "shield" will change.
It is possible that during this change, the Earth -- and the critters living on it -- may be subjected to anything from inconvenient levels of radition to life-threatening and/or mutation-inducing doses.
The reason that I bring this up is that there appears to be an uncomfortably close relationship between previous "flips" and hitherto-unexplained mass-extinctions and the subsequent emergance of entirely new species.
Everyone (except Al Gore) understands that correlation between events is not the same as causality. But there seem to be enough multiple-event correlation to suggest a causal relationship.
Sorry to mess up the holidays with this.
BTW, some folks think we are already overdue for the next flip. :-)
Some folks say that even the current crop of phenomena point toward the even already beginning.
Wondering... perhaps... could it coincide with our solar system (and us) passing from one side of the galactic equator to the other?
Even the lunacy of folks like Gore, and the 'scientists' that gave him the peace prize might well be attributable to the approaching 'event' having an affect on some folks' minds.
If it is controlled by our position within the galaxy itself, we are essentially screwed. Nothing will be the same, regardless of whether you stereo actually works or not.
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