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I wonder if this has some impact on the magnetosphere, the tides and the climate.

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"Some," yes, but almost certainly nothing we'd notice. The core is still spinning, it's just the differential between the crust and the core that has decreased.

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Why would it effect the tides? Tides are lunar based are they not?

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Sounds exactly like something the lizard people would say. /s obligatory

As dumb as that movie is, it had a stellar cast

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I'm no planetcoreologist but I reckon a planet sized spinning blob of molten metal slowing noticeably over a mere decade might be cause for a smidge of concern?

It happens every couple decades. It’s a nothing story, cool to scientists, conspiracy bait to laymen.

We do underestimate how one minor variable could turn a usual occurrence into a catastrophe. Whether that change is immediate or over a longer period of time, we could only guess.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to face the elephant in the room - eventually. Our lives are in the hands of statistical anomalies and strange nonsensical occurrences, time for us is not endless .

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Is the mechanism that causes this comparable to how a pendulum with a spring instead of a string goes from bouncing up and down to swinging side to side?

So you’re saying this is all because of some US government secret experiment that has chemically castrated us all and polluted our oceans?

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Reptoid mods would have a hissy fit...

There's even supposition it may reverse direction, and researchers are looking for evidence of past impacts.

Thing is, humans didn't even know the core-as-a-core existed 60 years ago. They were still thinking that all the surface stuff was one big shell. So while it's fascinating to learn new things, figuring out what this means will take time.

And NOBODY knows for sure what's next. It's outside of our control, let's enjoy the mystery.

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It's the pollution in our beans that did it.

"Noticably" doesn't mean a lot, on a human scale, when it's 21st-century scientific equipment doing the noticing.

A smidge of concern to who?

Isn't that what they believe is the actually cause of Mars' death.

Have you not seen the documentary “The Core”? Scary stuff man

Everyone knows the earth is hollow!! and the Nazis are riding dinosaurs down there and they’re up to some no good shenanigans

Perfect headline. This is the kind of headline everyone who should use. The one on the news I saw made it sound so alarming.

Am I the only one who is hella skeptical about this?

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Mmmm, but did they get a professional planetcoreologist?

You wouldn’t notice from a nature standpoint, but our tech might notice it.

The reason why we have never noticed it is because during the Roman times the poles switched sides.

I forget the archeological report from maybe a decade ago but supposedly looking at the overall iron matters in old clay remains and they noticed the alignment of the iron minerals having slowly shifted when comparing them over a few hundred years.

I think it was the earliest historical confirmation after we discovered that the poles move every ones in a while a bit around.

No but thanks to you I’m about to rent it

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This guy got unlimited hotpockets and Xena tapes in exchange for the cover up.

“Reverse” as in start rotating slightly slower than the rest of the Earth, which I guess is “reversing” in a frame corotating with the planet. The same goes for “stopping”, those are really misleading terms to use because the core is very much rotating indeed at about one turn in 24 hours as expected! There’s absolutely nothing that could make it actually stop. Unfortunately, popular media is as clueless as always.

What’s there to be skeptical about? The core used to be slightly superrotating, ie. rotating a bit faster than the rest of the planet, now it has slowed down a bit and rotating at about the same rate as everything else, and it seems to be natural variation.

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Dont worry nothing to see here..is this the precursor to the poles shifting?

Mom, can we have planetcoreologist?

No we have planetcoreologist at home.

planetcoreologist at home:

>There’s absolutely nothing that could make it actually stop.

Nah the Earth's core could theoretically be stopped.

Just throw several moons/planetoids at it. The first one or two to blast the surface out of the way, the next to counteract most of the angular momentum, and maybe another one to really fine-tune things.

Couldn't possibly be the sign of a catastrophic pole-shift that happens periodically and that the Earth is due for, no way

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Only way to speed it up again is to place nukes and detonate at specific times. We just need a drill tank.

Yeah it's called the industrial revolution

There is also proof of this occuring in Mid-Ocean Ridges. Another link here in case the first doesn't work.

You’d have to be gentle enough not to blast away too much of the core in the process. so I’d think many, many smaller bodies over a longer period of time could work better.

Why should you?

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How do they know the spin of the core? (ie the pace, direction, etc)

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If we get all the hamsters on their wheels and hook the wheels up to the core we can get it spinning again.

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So it was spinner faster a decade ago…will it be even slower a decade from now? Would that be significant in anyway? People are worried about global warming because they feel the effects won’t be there until we’re all dead anyway but this shit seems a little more short on the time window.

we will be long gone before it has any effect

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>There’s absolutely nothing that could make it actually
>
>stop
>
>.

The limits of human imagination in no way apply to reality.

Also, a magnetic engine can cease to function rather quickly when specific criteria change, so you may want to throttle back on "Absolutely".

It’s not a “magnetic engine” in any relevant sense. It’s a huge rotating ball of iron and nickel and conservation of angular momentum is a thing! Truly ludicrous amounts of momentum would have to be transferred somewhere else for it to stop rotating.

(Now, to be fair, a mechanism does exist that slowly bleeds off Earth’s rotational momentum, and has done so for billions of years: the moon and its tidal forces. In the far future Earth would become tidally locked with the moon, and rotate very slowly, if the sun didn’t become a red giant first. But somehow only slowing down the core? That would require magic.)

Anyway, my use of “absolutely” should be taken in the context of the discussion, just like everything else. There’s no reason to add some sort of an “except via magic” to every other sentence, pedantic Redditors notwithstanding.

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>It’s not a “magnetic engine” in any relevant sense.

Preposterous. Relevance is a matter of perspective; your prerequisite appears to be something along the lines of "if it ain't human-made it ain't real"?

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>It’s a huge rotating ball of iron and nickel and conservation of angular momentum is a thing! Truly ludicrous amounts of momentum would have to be transferred somewhere else for it to stop rotating.

...humans think.
See, until the 1960s, the existence of the core-as-a-core wasn't known. So the "obvious reality" you're assuming is younger than television.

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>(Now, to be fair, a mechanism does exist that slowly bleeds off Earth’s rotational momentum, and has done so for billions of years: the moon and its tidal forces. In the far future Earth would become tidally locked with the moon, and rotate very slowly, if the sun didn’t become a red giant first.)

Yes, that's how an engine operates on a timescale different from the ones humans focus on. You came that closet to getting the idea.

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> But somehow only slowing down the core? That would require magic.)

Magic is, by definition, merely reality: Magic is defined as a "supernatural force which influences reality" and "supernatural" merely means "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature" - and the "laws of nature" were written by humans who do not know everything.

See the one constant limitation here? Human understanding.

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>Anyway, my use of “absolutely” should be taken in the context of the discussion, just like everything else.

No - your use of a word will be taken at face value - the only use words have in true information exchange. If you are unable to use the words accurately or sincerely, that's your concern to manage.

Magnetic North has been wandering around a lot the last decade or so. Might be related, though doubt it's causal.

Finally a sane headline about this, not saying it's reversed direction

It might be slower a decade from now, and then the fact that it's slower than the rest will make it speed back up again. It's likely just a slow oscillation between faster and slower as the moving liquid outer core stops it from ever being truly in sync.

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Thanks for the explanation.

It's got to be related. I'm very much not any kind of expert; but the Magnetosphere is generated by the motion of the liquid iron core, the North Pole is determined by the geometry of that motion relative to the surface, and we are measuring these processes in tandem. There may be a black-box of complex math between these two things, but I feel like it's certain they are related.

So you're saying I should panic and buy toilet paper?

That wouldn’t even matter, we’ll just have to adjust out directions to the fact that North and South have flipped.

Do you have any evidence about the poles switching times during the Roman era? As far as I was aware the last time it happened was like half a million years ago or something, which certainly was not during the Roman era.

Hey man, do the crazies some justice!

The hollow earthers still believe in the iron core and the mantle and all that, they believe that the lithosphere is pocketed with vast cavernous areas of habital land

Honestly I will have to look into it, but as I said this was over a decade ago and on some Discovery channel or History channel documentary from when they actually still showed scientific material.

So basically this information might be massively outdated or having been disproven by now. Which was why I had mentioned the date of the information / when I learnt about it.

It could have been just a sensationalist documentary and then never retracted.

It's easy to be confident when there's limited information available.

While what you're saying is highly probable based on our current understanding, these two phenomena may be related - it is not absolute. Assumption precludes, and oft forgets, discovery.

There is no credible evidence for a total geomagnetic pole reversal during Roman times. The last one was at least 780,000 years ago.

There is however research that talks about localized evolution in the geomagnetic field, for example this one in Iberia

Ah thank you for the links and the second link might be what I was thinking of.

Interesting reads, even if half of it is a bit beyond my normal comprehension.

Is this why days have been shortening slightly? We used to need leap seconds at regular intervals, but they’ve been less common recently.