One of the most fascinating natural phenomena on Earth is the flipping of its magnetic field, which has occurred hundreds of times in the last 160 million years. When the magnetic field flips, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa. The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, so we could be heading for another reversal soon. Now, physicists in Italy have found that the frequency of these polarity reversals is not random as previously thought but occurs in clusters, revealing some kind of "memory" of previous events (physics/0603086).Although a full geomagnetic polarity reversal can take thousands of years to complete, the implications could be enormous. As well as affecting the migration trajectories of birds and other animals, the disruption to the Earth's magnetic field could expose the Earth to hazardous cosmic rays -- a scenario that some researchers have linked to mass extinction events like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. Geoscientists believe that our planet's internal magnetic dynamo is responsible for pole reversals, but the actual mechanism is not well understood. Previous analyses assumed that the number of times the poles have reversed over last 160 million years follows a Poisson distribution, implying that the events are random. The Poisson distribution tells you the probability of a number of events occurring in a fixed time if the events are independent and the average rate is known. A good example of the Poisson distribution in physics is the likelihood of unstable radioactive nuclei decaying in a certain period.

Now, a team of physicists led by Vincenzo Carbone of the University of Calabria have discovered that the sequence of polarity reversals can be well described by a Lévy distribution instead. In contrast to Poisson statistics, the Lévy distribution describes stochastic processes that are characterised by the presence of "memory" effects -- or long-range correlations between the events in time. Lévy distributions are widely used to study many critical phenomena, such as earthquakes, and also when analysing financial data. The researchers obtained their results by careful statistical analysis of different sets of paleomagnetic data containing estimates of when the Earth's poles reversed.

View: Full Article | Source: Physicsweb.org

I have read some books on this subject. Some people are perdicting that this is what will happen in 2012. Some think the crazy weather we have been having is just the beginning. The Earth will begin to wobble before the actual event. I wonder if the Earth does flip, what that throw us off balance? I mean how fast do you think it will take to flip??

I would like to know what effects this will have on us as a society and a species as
a whole. Will it cause a mass extinction or will it be business as usual?
Is this phenomenon supposed to happen soon, like within the next ten years? Or
sometime in the distant future,say Ten Thousand years from now? If the latter is
true, then I'm not going to worry about it. I have more pressing matters to deal with.

(Well, we'll try this again. Lost my stuff on the first try.)
Look up Gordon Michael Scallion on a search engine and you will find a lot of information on his "predications" of this happening. Think of the earth's crust as a "skin" or "peel". As the poles melt, the peel slides. And yes, many think that this is the "end" in 2012. In reality, it the "beginning" for the earth to start all over, again. As it has many, many times past. Whether or not there will be a handful of human survivors...I think so.

This might be easier to read: pbs.org

This is why I have been preparing my survival kit over the past 5 years. [/nojoke]

Why don't scientists just aadmitthat they don't have the faintest idea what killed the dinosaurs? I've heart soooooooooooooo many different scenarios that they claim "is a very likely culprit in the extinction of the dinosaurs", and its starting to get old lol.

In a magnetic reversal, the Earth doesn't flip, only the magnetic field. Magnetic north continually wanders. In the last decade it has headed north from Alaska out into the Arctic Ocean. A flip takes thousands of years, during which the overall strength of the field decreases. It is believed that the Earth's magnetic field is generated by currents in the outer core, which is liquid iron. I'm not sure that anyone has written the equations for that.

~~~Cebrakon

oh joy, i cannot wait till the Earth flips over...

hint, that was sarcasm

So what are you including in your survival package? Is there really any place to run??

Wow... My magnet hanging in my room will be reversing its direction soon!