Magnets: They're both positive and negative

Magnets are all fun and sciency until the earth gets knocked off its access.

I don’t have to tell you that magnetic north is different from geographic or true north. We all know Santa’s North Pole stays put right where the giant candy cane was anchored into the permafrost back when he and his merry band of elves started that gift-giving franchise. But magnetic north — to where the arrowy thing in your compass is wont to point — just takes up residence wherever it feels like.

We’ve been able to google that information since James Clark Ross was credited in 1831 with finding magnetic north where it was living in Canada’s beautiful Cape Adelaide, about 1,000 miles south of true north.

But in 1903, we started figuring out that magnetic north is actually a nomad by nature. Roald Admunsen went to visit magnetic north and found it had moved but left a forwarding address to a nearby location. Since then humans have been tracking magnetic north, and lately it’s been sprinting toward Siberia.

As its travel time has gained momentum from about 5.5 miles per year up to 37 miles per year, the real scientists have taken over from the geographers in an attempt to understand why magnetic north shifts, what is causing the speed change and what problems the shift might be causing.

Scientist pretty much have it figured out that Earth’s molten center is roiling around and two big blobs of this magnetic liquid iron are located — you know it — under Canada and Siberia. At the moment the blob under Siberia has gotten bigger and it’s drawing magnetic north to it like, well, like a magnet to a big blob of iron.

In the short term, we need to know where magnetic north is mostly because all of our navigational devices need to know how far and which direction magnetic north is from true north to adjust GPS calculations. Because, y’know, ain’t one of those GPS devices gonna stop and ask for directions from a kindly stranger.

Airplanes will be landing at the wrong airport, satellites will fall from the sky, you’ll drive to the wrong house party for Halloween.

Essentially, chaos will ensue.

In the long run, though, scientists also want to know if the north and south poles are going to swap ends — again. Apparently, this has happened a few times in the history of the world, the last time 780,000 years ago, but scientists don’t know what problems, if any, this north-south reversal might cause.

I mean, we could know what problems arise, but the humanoids from 780,000 years ago were really poor record keepers. Scientists know that some human-ish people were living in the Gran Dolina cave in Spain at the time, but those folks didn’t even leave so much as a cave drawing to tell us anything.

Did they eat well that year because all the birds were confused and crashed and died in their backyard? Was the sewer backed up because the toilet kept flushing in the opposite direction? Did they have uninvited guests at Halloween?

We don’t know.

Why is this topic important to us?

Do an internet search for the world’s strongest magnet and all the “old” info says basically, “The strongest magnet on Earth IS Earth, dummy.”

Until 2021.

A multinational scientific team working on a nuclear fusion reactor in France is assembling a magnet that will have a magnetic field strength of 13 tesla, which means nothing until you know that’s about 280,000 times stronger than Earth’s own magnetic field.

That’s two-hundred-eighty-thousand times stronger.

Am I the only person on Earth who can imagine the entire molten iron center of Earth getting magnetically sucked out of the Earth's crust through France when the switch gets flipped to ON?

Do these people not know how magnets work? Can they not imagine dire consequences?

Have they never read a real science fiction book in their lives?

Because, yeah, magnets are all fun and sciency until the earth gets knocked off its access, then don’t come cryin’ to me because I’m just going to say I told you so — unless of course we’re all hurtling like so much cosmic trash through space where sound or oxygen don’t exist — at which point I assume anything I have to say will be irrelevant.

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No, geographers aren’t real scientists. They’re just people who go places and point at stuff, and if investors are involved, they draw a map as a simple token of appreciation for funding the adventure at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .