November 22, 2023 • 12 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. The whole gang's here,
even in spirit. So let's go stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Uh yeah, you put this one together. This is a
good one.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
We're talking about the magnetic field, and 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.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
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 if I think
iron and nickel, and that that is basically bathed in
a bath of molten outer core. And because that molten
outer core is constantly roiling and convecting and doing all
(00:48):
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 and
south pole. Yeah, 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
(01:12):
particles that are bombarding Earth at all time from reaching
Earth generally and killing us, just shooting right through your throat.
And out the other side, so life can exist on
Earth and then less importantly but more beautifully also creates
the auroras.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
And also why I wear a kevlar turtleneck actually not
a dicky really because.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It gets warm in the summer.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, that's smart.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So you've got that bipolar core.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
You know, we have the North pole in the South
pole geographically, like, we know where those are.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
We've mapped those out.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
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 that roiling sort of
(02:10):
molten gunky we're 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. The same
thing is going on there that creates instability and sort
of just movement.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah. So that's suffice to say that 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.
It's called excursions, and they can move all over the place.
And as a matter of fact, when they what seems
(02:51):
to pass what seems to be a threshold, they flip
and all of a sudden, the South Pole is that
the geographical nor 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.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, it's called polarity reversal.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
There's some disagreement among the scientific community about how often
this happens, how quickly it happens. There was a study
in twenty twenty from the Scripts Oceanographic Institute in San Diego,
San Diego, Right, Yeah, he said, sd I didn't think
it was South Dakota.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Definitely, or southern Durham, North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
It could have been that one. It's definitely not South
Dakota though, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So they had a new model based on one hundred
thousand 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 ten degrees a year. That is equal
to the distance between Atlanta and Toronto. For Aussie friends,
brisbe in Melbourne or if you're in London. Those are
(04:03):
the three places that listen to us basically, sure Canada,
Australia in the UK, or London and Prague. And that
is about ten times what scientists thought before the study
came out.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, the pole can wander that far in a year.
A year. You just like, when you hear about this,
you're like, Okay, that's 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 the year
and back, and it wanders all over the place. It's
not like it follows like a set line. Because again,
right the molten inner or outer courts roiling, it looks
(04:36):
probably a lot like the surface of the sun, and
so all the little spots in weird like areas and everything.
That's where the kind of like the magnetic poles actually
traveled like down a plinko set essentially, but is severear
plinko set. If you can wrap your mind around that
kind of.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Thing, all right, Well I'm gonna wrap my mind around it,
and we're gonna take a break, and then I'm gonna
unwrap my mind right after this. All right, so we
(05:23):
were talking about this thing is it's really holland these
poles are moving around and they can actually flip.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And the last time that happened.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Was about forty two thousand years ago in what's called
the La Champ I guess the La Champ excursion, great
man name, 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 nineteen sixties.
And during this excursion, the North Pole went across North America.
(05:54):
Then said, all right, now I'm gonna 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 in Antarctica for about four hundred years,
and then I'm going to go back up to the
Indian Ocean to the actual geographical North Pole.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Yeah, roughly that area, back to generally where the north
magnetic north Pole typically is. Right. Yeah, that's really fast.
Four hundred years on a geological timescale is like a
blink is too slow as a description or analogy, And
so the Lashapis excursion seems to have had some pretty
(06:32):
significant effects on the planet at forty two thousand 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,
(06:55):
and so too did the Neanderthals. It was a really
really sick, magnificant period of like surprising and kind of
dismal activity in Earth's history. And they have traced this
to basically a weaken in the magnetic field. That is
probable the magnetic field became very weak and that allowed
the poles to flip very quickly, and that it wasn't
(07:18):
necessarily the poles flipping that caused all of this weird
stuff to happen, but that the magnetic field being weakened
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
(07:40):
around Earth.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
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,
(08:04):
And what they've kind of come out with was a
we're not sure exactly when it's going to 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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, it doesn't seem to.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah, so they can't say like, all right, well here's
when it's going to happen again, But they do think
this was a really the La Shamp 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. It was
(08:39):
over a much slower time period. The La Champ 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.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, I mean tens of thousands of years versus hundreds
of years. That's pretty significant as far as differences go, right,
And if if it sounds 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
(09:10):
recording reversals in polarity of Earth's poles. This is very
much what we're talking about. So because they think it
happens over you know, 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 La Shop excursion. They're not particularly worried
(09:35):
about it, but we do know that if it did
happen on like a normal slow timescale, we still have
to adapt because a lot of our technology relies on
a stable magnetic field.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
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 America and South Africa where there is a weaker
magnetic field than elsewhere on Earth, and when satellites and
(10:10):
stuff go through there in spacecraft there are issues.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
They're like can you hear me? Are you still there?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And they say, in space, no one can hear you scream.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Name that movie.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Space Balls exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
So that's an example of 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 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
(10:49):
could be like a six to forty two billion dollar
cost for the United States, which honestly, that's chump change
when you look at you know, budgets of the United States.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
But that's a day, yeah, a day, So it's.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Not like uh.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
I mean, that's a lot of money obviously, but it's
not like that would wreck the American economy anything.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It depends on how long it went on for you know, well, yeah,
I guess so. I mean, if they didn't get up
and running within a few hours, that could be you know.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It could add up, It could add up.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Who could Jos baseballs.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
One other thing, Chuck, because the disappearance of the Neanderthals
coincides with the weakening of the magnetosphere and probably bombardment
of UV radiation and ions. Yeah, maybe right that the
Neanderthals really didn't help. You might be onto something. Man,
that's an old one. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I got nothing else? JM.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Well, then short stuff is out. Stuff you should know
is a pretty action of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. The whole gang's here,
even in spirit. So let's go stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Uh yeah, you put this one together. This is a
good one.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
We're talking about the magnetic field, and 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.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
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 if I think
iron and nickel, and that that is basically bathed in
a bath of molten outer core. And because that molten
outer core is constantly roiling and convecting and doing all
(00:48):
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 and
south pole. Yeah, 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
(01:12):
particles that are bombarding Earth at all time from reaching
Earth generally and killing us, just shooting right through your throat.
And out the other side, so life can exist on
Earth and then less importantly but more beautifully also creates
the auroras.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
And also why I wear a kevlar turtleneck actually not
a dicky really because.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It gets warm in the summer.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, that's smart.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So you've got that bipolar core.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
You know, we have the North pole in the South
pole geographically, like, we know where those are.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
We've mapped those out.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
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 that roiling sort of
(02:10):
molten gunky we're 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. The same
thing is going on there that creates instability and sort
of just movement.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah. So that's suffice to say that 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.
It's called excursions, and they can move all over the place.
And as a matter of fact, when they what seems
(02:51):
to pass what seems to be a threshold, they flip
and all of a sudden, the South Pole is that
the geographical nor 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.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, it's called polarity reversal.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
There's some disagreement among the scientific community about how often
this happens, how quickly it happens. There was a study
in twenty twenty from the Scripts Oceanographic Institute in San Diego,
San Diego, Right, Yeah, he said, sd I didn't think
it was South Dakota.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Definitely, or southern Durham, North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
It could have been that one. It's definitely not South
Dakota though, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
So they had a new model based on one hundred
thousand 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 ten degrees a year. That is equal
to the distance between Atlanta and Toronto. For Aussie friends,
brisbe in Melbourne or if you're in London. Those are
(04:03):
the three places that listen to us basically, sure Canada,
Australia in the UK, or London and Prague. And that
is about ten times what scientists thought before the study
came out.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, the pole can wander that far in a year.
A year. You just like, when you hear about this,
you're like, Okay, that's 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 the year
and back, and it wanders all over the place. It's
not like it follows like a set line. Because again,
right the molten inner or outer courts roiling, it looks
(04:36):
probably a lot like the surface of the sun, and
so all the little spots in weird like areas and everything.
That's where the kind of like the magnetic poles actually
traveled like down a plinko set essentially, but is severear
plinko set. If you can wrap your mind around that
kind of.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Thing, all right, Well I'm gonna wrap my mind around it,
and we're gonna take a break, and then I'm gonna
unwrap my mind right after this. All right, so we
(05:23):
were talking about this thing is it's really holland these
poles are moving around and they can actually flip.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And the last time that happened.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Was about forty two thousand years ago in what's called
the La Champ I guess the La Champ excursion, great
man name, 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 nineteen sixties.
And during this excursion, the North Pole went across North America.
(05:54):
Then said, all right, now I'm gonna 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 in Antarctica for about four hundred years,
and then I'm going to go back up to the
Indian Ocean to the actual geographical North Pole.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Yeah, roughly that area, back to generally where the north
magnetic north Pole typically is. Right. Yeah, that's really fast.
Four hundred years on a geological timescale is like a
blink is too slow as a description or analogy, And
so the Lashapis excursion seems to have had some pretty
(06:32):
significant effects on the planet at forty two thousand 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,
(06:55):
and so too did the Neanderthals. It was a really
really sick, magnificant period of like surprising and kind of
dismal activity in Earth's history. And they have traced this
to basically a weaken in the magnetic field. That is
probable the magnetic field became very weak and that allowed
the poles to flip very quickly, and that it wasn't
(07:18):
necessarily the poles flipping that caused all of this weird
stuff to happen, but that the magnetic field being weakened
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
(07:40):
around Earth.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
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,
(08:04):
And what they've kind of come out with was a
we're not sure exactly when it's going to 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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, it doesn't seem to.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah, so they can't say like, all right, well here's
when it's going to happen again, But they do think
this was a really the La Shamp 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. It was
(08:39):
over a much slower time period. The La Champ 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.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, I mean tens of thousands of years versus hundreds
of years. That's pretty significant as far as differences go, right,
And if if it sounds 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
(09:10):
recording reversals in polarity of Earth's poles. This is very
much what we're talking about. So because they think it
happens over you know, 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 La Shop excursion. They're not particularly worried
(09:35):
about it, but we do know that if it did
happen on like a normal slow timescale, we still have
to adapt because a lot of our technology relies on
a stable magnetic field.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
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 America and South Africa where there is a weaker
magnetic field than elsewhere on Earth, and when satellites and
(10:10):
stuff go through there in spacecraft there are issues.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
They're like can you hear me? Are you still there?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And they say, in space, no one can hear you scream.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Name that movie.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Space Balls exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
So that's an example of 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 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
(10:49):
could be like a six to forty two billion dollar
cost for the United States, which honestly, that's chump change
when you look at you know, budgets of the United States.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
But that's a day, yeah, a day, So it's.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Not like uh.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
I mean, that's a lot of money obviously, but it's
not like that would wreck the American economy anything.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It depends on how long it went on for you know, well, yeah,
I guess so. I mean, if they didn't get up
and running within a few hours, that could be you know.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It could add up, It could add up.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Who could Jos baseballs.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
One other thing, Chuck, because the disappearance of the Neanderthals
coincides with the weakening of the magnetosphere and probably bombardment
of UV radiation and ions. Yeah, maybe right that the
Neanderthals really didn't help. You might be onto something. Man,
that's an old one. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I got nothing else? JM.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Well, then short stuff is out. Stuff you should know
is a pretty action of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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