Are the poles shfting rite now?

Question

is it the awnser of the globe warming

Answer 1

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.

As for Global warming effects - the timescales for both the magnetic shifts and the Milankovic cycles are slow compared to the temperature rises we have seen in the last century!