speculation: earth's mag field flip

G=EMC^2 Glazier wrote:


Bert, it's nice you have some lab space to experiment in. I had a
little lab when I was younger, down in a daylight basement. It was
always cool down there. I made and stored my homemade wine down there
too!

Well, I see what you are saying about the sediment magnetic layers.
But apparently most geologists disagree with you that that is how it
would work. Seems they think that the Earth's magnetism would have
more effect on aligning the particles than the magnetism of the
underlying layers.

I don't know how to tell who is right, unless you would want to finance
my doing extension lab experimentation on this! Ha! Ha!

Double-A

"Robert Finch" <[Registered users can see links. ]> wrote in message
news:w%vIe.26758$[Registered users can see links. ]. ..


I'm wondering what I would have to do to test this theory ? I wonder if the
Earth has a second moon, that's very small with an elliptical orbit over the
poles. Something that could be a big chunk of iron that would focus the
magnetic field, that might take thousands of years to orbit, and sometimes
causes a flip.

If there is an external object affecting the magnetic field, then the
spiral? pattern of the magnetic field flip should be different than the
pattern produced in sediments, if the flip is caused by internal forces. Are
there any records showing the direction of the magnetic poles took as it
changes from North to South ?

"Robert Finch" <[Registered users can see links. ]> wrote in message
news:vS1Ke.6822$[Registered users can see links. ].. .


Kepler's third law:

P1^2/P2^2 = R1^3/R2^3

The Moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 384,400km with
a period of about 27 days. Call this body 1, so P1 = 27 days,
R1 = 384,000km.

If your hypothetical moon has a period of "several thousand years",
and we'll guess 10,000 for purposes of illustration, then that
makes P2 = 10,000*365.25 days = 3652500 days.

The resulting orbital radius, by Kepler's third then, would be

R1^3*P2^2/P1^2 = 1.0x10^9 km

or about a billion kilometers. The Earth's orbit around the Sun is
only around 150 million kilometers. Your hypothetical body would
have an orbit that's some seven times the size of orbit of the Earth.
No way. It would orbit the Sun, not the Earth.


They would be hard to come by. The poles are characterized by very
long periods of stability and relatively shorter periods when they
go on the move and reverse direction. The 'records' are written
into sediments and lava flows at spreading fault lines at what are
essentially geologically-paced rates. To make a crude analogy, it
would be like asking to find evidence of the path of the flipping of
magnetic domains on a digital tape after the tape's been written.
Still, it might be possible to find such data in periodic lava flows
that happen to 'sample' the magnetic field during the right period
of time.