Re: Magnetic storm on NOVA

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
says...
> Robert Calvert wrote:
> 
> >I thought that this was an interesting show:
> >http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/ I especially liked the part about the
> >earth's magnetic field moving 60 degrees in a matter of hours if not minutes
> >at some time in the distant past.
> >
> Are they sure that this piece of cooling lava didn't get rotated some by
> other lava flows?  That would cause the apparent movement of the Earth's
> magnetic field recorded in the frozen lava.  
> 
> Also they briefly showed a graph of the intensity of the magnetic
> field (recorded by pottery firing) over the last several thousand years.
> It looked as if the field intensity was at current levels 5000 years ago,
> then went up slowly over the next 4000 years to about 10% higher,
> peaked and started to decline over the last 300 years.  A rapid decline
> compared to earlier on, but there may have been quick variations in the
> past that the pottery record missed.  
> 
> The field has flipped thousands of times before, and life didn't get blasted
> out of existence at any flip.  They finally mentioned that the only impact
> on life is that cancer rates would be about twice that of normal times.  
> So it won't be the end of the world type disaster when the flip does
> happen again.  

The doom-sayers already have told us the "ozone hole" will cause 
this sort of "disaster" (100% increase in cancer).  I can only 
imagine what the tree-huggers would cry about if the magnetic 
field even burped.  

That said, I imagine there would be many disruptions, many small, 
some perhaps large, we've not even considered.   Obviously 
compasses may be affected.   A couple I haven't seen mentioned in 
these articles:  soft error rates in computers would increase 
significantly and the Hubble Telescope would be toast.

-- 
  Keith