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Thanks to the movie 2012, people have been talking about a polar shift. Before the movie though Clive Cussler also released a polar shift story. Much like gray goo and other stories on nanobots in the 90s, polar shift stories became popular in the noughties.
A polar shift should not be confused with geomagnetic reversal. Pole shifts happen only once every 100 million years or so and the result is that the Earth changes its tilt completely. Can you imagine the Earth suddenly turning upside down? There’d have to be some pretty strange things happening for that to occur, like a star taking a journey through our solar system for example. Actually it was probably the moon turning up that caused the last one. So, no chance of a polar shift anytime soon!
A geomagnetic reversal, on the other hand, is more common. A geomagnetic reversal happens when a number of things occur that disrupt the electromagnetic field of the Earth. When this happens it is possible for there to be a geomagnetic excursion, where the magnetic field disappears for a short while, and then a starting up again where the field chooses opposite poles. So, North becomes South and South becomes North. Usually the geomagnetic excursion ends up going back to the same poles though. In any case there isn’t much scientific evidence to suggest anything bad happens to life on Earth if there is an excursion or a reversal.
Unfortunately, this is the 21st century, and a geomagnetic reversal will knock out all our guidance systems effectively pulling planes out of the sky, just like the millennium bug! 😛 Energy around the Earth will be all over the place and, in extreme cases, may wipe anything magnetic. It would probably not be as extreme as an electromagnetic pulse as it is believed that it would slowly turn off and slowly turn back on again.
So, why is everyone talking about it now? It happens every 10,000 years or so when the electromagnetic field of the Earth starts getting weaker. Earth’s field has started to get weaker and, if there is a geomagnetic excursion or geomagnetic reversal, it is highly likely to happen sometime between 2012 and 2024.
Looks like we’re in an interesting decade!