Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Yikes, Another Global Calamity

Nature reports on the ever more faster moving magnetic North Pole. They note:

Second, the motion of the north magnetic pole made the problem worse. The pole wanders in unpredictable ways that have fascinated explorers and scientists since James Clark Ross first measured it in 1831 in the Canadian Arctic. In the mid-1990s it picked up speed, from around 15 kilometres per year to around 55 kilometres per year. By 2001, it had entered the Arctic Ocean — where, in 2007, a team including Chulliat landed an aeroplane on the sea ice in an attempt to locate the pole. In 2018, the pole crossed the International Date Line into the Eastern Hemisphere. It is currently making a beeline for Siberia.

Now the German Press notes a bit of excitement:

By 2018, scientists at US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Geological Survey realized they needed to release an updated WMM because it had become "so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors." The wandering pole is driven by unpredictable changes in liquid iron inside the Earth. Due to the US government shutdown, scientists have been unable to release the updated WMM. Instead, they have pushed back the date to January 30, hoping that the government will be running by then. But it's unclear if that will be the case.

The issue is that GPS is independent of the magnetic pole so who cares and second a shift in the pole has  real issues not yet discussed, such as the flipping of the Pole to the South. Global Warming anyone?