Polar Shift?

Question

What exactly is it, I was watching the history channel and was wondering what exactly happens?

Answer 1

The History Channel will show just about anything that they thing anybody will watch.  It does not matter if it is true or not, or if there is any evidence for it, just that somebody will watch.

There is no such thing as "pole shift", "polar shift", or however you call it.  This myth is spread by poor fools who get confused with MAGNETIC pole shift -- which has nothing to do with the pole shift the History channel is talking about.

Answer 2

The magnetic poles move all the time.

There is a geologic record that shows it has happened many times in our past but not at regular intervals. Time between reversals can be 10000 yrs or a million years.

However - we know that the magnetic field does not collapse in the process - if it did, there would be major extinctions that correlate with the geologic record for pole reversals - there is no correlation.

The latest hypothesis is that the Earth's magnetic field gets chaotic, with lots of north and south poles - so we still have a magnetic field, but compasses will be useless. And then it straightens itself back out, but with north and south reverse.

This is actually similar to what the sun does - but the sun does it on a regular 11 year cycle.

As for when it will happen - those people that observe the magnetic field think it will go through its chaotic thing and reverse some time soon based on how it is currently behaving, but that is a hypothesis waiting for the event to occur to be tested, and the exact date certainly is not known.

Now for the rotational axis and its shift:

The axis of the earth does wobble on several known timescales. These wobbles are known as the Milankovich cycles.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovic_...

Basically the axis of the earth’s rotation does not always point to Polaris (the Pole Star); and we are not always inclined at 23.5 deg. So the poles do move relative to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and relative to the stars – but the shifts are minor.