Originally posted by Subhuti
I've heard that we might get hit by a solar flare and it will fry the power grid. It happened in the 1800's but only fried telegraph lines and tree
tops source Just think of the damage it would cause to our satellites! If
all our satellites get fried that means no GPS, no early defense systems. We could easily get attacked by a foreign enemy.
Most satellites are
hardened against solar interference. They're magnetically shielded and can be powered down to minimize or
outright prevent radiation damage. The bigger threat is drag when the atmosphere expands, which is why more and more satellites are being launched
into higher orbits.
The fires you refer to were sparked by shorted-out lines, not by the geomagnetic interference directly. The
flash point of wood is around 300 °C. That'd be one heck of a
sunburn.
Also a polar shift will take place survive2012.com...
There are numerous pole shift claims being made about 2012, and Geryl's just might be the craziest. He attributes his geophysical miracle to
magnetism, but he seems ignorant of the fact that doing so does not mean he can just ignore the requisite energy. Invoking magnetism doesn't help,
because the energy required to flip the core and reverse the rotation of the outer planetary layers remains the same as it would be when simply
reversing angular momentum straightway. Energy is conserved. I can only speculate that Geryl missed the day they discussed this in his high school
physics class.
Even if we were to ignore basic physics and assume Geryl's fanciful core-inversion/rotation-reversal could happen, the resulting event would not just
cause apocalyptic tsunamis and earthquakes, but it would likely boil away the oceans and kill most life on the planet, assuming everything didn't just
outright melt. That's a bit of a guess on my part, but the heat energy released would be positively monstrous in any event. Geryl wants to sell you
a book on "How to Survive 2012," but apparently even he himself is oblivious to the implications of his claims.
Returning to reality for a moment, Earth's magnetic poles do move, and magnetic pole shifts do happen, but they are
geomagnetic events. The
core doesn't flip over. The Earth doesn't start spinning in the other direction. Also, these things can take upwards of thousands of years to
occur.
Some preliminary data as of late has suggested that perhaps some reversals can occur in as little as a few years, but there's nothing conclusive yet.
In fact, it's been found that
Earth's poles moved as much as 30 degrees over the last 200
million years, but no rapid pole shift occurred during this time. Even if such a shift were to take place, there's
no indication that the process would necessarily be harmful. We would have to recalibrate
navigation equipment, and migratory animals might be confused. A drastically weakened field might increase our exposure to cosmic radiation, but this
isn't a foregone conclusion with pole wander. The geomagnetic field could just as easily maintain a typical amount of flux during such a
transition.
Most importantly, there is no indication that this will or even can happen in 2012, and no magical Geryl-esque cataclysm is possible, let alone
imminent as he would have you believe.
edit on 28-12-2010 by UndeadDinosaur because: typo