2012 Doomsday? According to...

Hi everybody!

First off, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Robert and my "handle" is
dontwannadie. Now, I'd like to extend that user name to: don't want to die in anything referred to as an "event" or "disaster."
I'm not afraid of death, but would prefer to go quietly and peacefully. Like many human beings walking the planet, I have fears and phobias. That said, I realize that the people who are logging in to this site are attracted to outlandish theories and off shoot ideas. As thrilling as all of this may be at times, there is a risk involved... anxiety. Like children who love a good horror flick, we get a similar effect by scaring ourselves with doomsday scenarios. It's great fun.
I'm with you! I love the thrill of heated debates or coffee fueled rhetoric between fellow conspiracy buffs. We are attracted to the bold statements...
the facts are, usually, significantly less alluring.
There are answers, my friends. There are reasonable explanations for just about everything on this crazy planet. What I'd like to offer this site is a bit of an easy way out for those who are seeking to settle their anxiety.

For those of you who are dreading 2012... even in the deep, seemingly sleepy subconscious... here's a few reassuring statements from sources that know exactly what they're talking about:

On the POLAR SHIFT from NASA... you know how giant tidal waves could cover the earth? The world stops turning? Our DNA is altered? Earthquakes scatter us all into a terrorized frenzy? NO WAY! Not even close...

Recently researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. (fifty years!!!!)
The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
"The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.
"Old magnetic fields swept up then should re-appear as big sunspots in 2010-2011." Dikpati's forecast puts Solar Max at 2012.

What does this mean??? Nothing. What did it mean in 1958?
Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico.
This is the worst case scenario. No worries.

But that's the polar shift of the sun, not the earth. What happens then?

Dr. David P. Stern, author of The Great magnet, The Earth, who's Main interests are mapping and physics of the global magnetosphere, also science education and history of science (headed AGU Committee on the History of Geophysics 1981-88, Eos history editor 1999-2001) says...

"Some people worry that during magnetic reversals the Earth would receive a higher dosage of high-energy ions and electrons ("radiation" in common terms), which might affect us and any living creatures on Earth. This is not so. Even today, the magnetic shield is not effective near the magnetic poles, yet the radiation received there on the ground is only slightly higher than anywhere else.

No one knows when the next field reversal will occur: in the past, they have occurred on the average about once in 500,000 years. The change, whenever it occurs, will be gradual and the field will not drop to zero in between--doing so would mean that the magnetic energy of the Earth was somehow converted or dissipated, and all processes we know for this tend to run on scales of thousands of year, if not more.

Right now the main (dipole) field is getting weaker at a rate of about 7% per century, and if you draw a straight line through the points you find it reversing between 1000 and 2000 years from now. It might happen, though the trend may also change before then. But as explained elsewhere, even if a reversal occurs, the field does not disappear during the time of polarity change, it just gets more complex and weaker.

The polar field of the Sun seems to reverse every 11 years or so, taking about a year or more. "

So, that's that. Next... The Mayans.

More on the Pole Shift from Dr. David P. Stern...

The magnetic field of the Earth changes all the time, and yes, magnetic charts have to be redrawn from time to time (this was first found in 1641, by an Englishman named Gellibrand). And yes, in the century and a half since the first careful mapping of the Earth's field, the dipole has become weaker by about 8% (the rate may have speeded up in 1970). If you draw a straight line through the points, you will find that perhaps 1200 years from now, the line goes through zero.

Extending straight lines too far beyond the present, however, is risky business, as noted by no less a scientific authority than Mark Twain. In "Life on the Mississippi" Twain noted that the Mississippi river was getting progressively shorter (mainly by floods--and by people--creating shortcuts through bends in the river) and he wrote:

"Now, if I wanted to be one of those scientific people, and "let on" to prove what had occured in the remote past by what had occured in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occured in late years, what an opportunity is here! ... Please observe:

In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the lower Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the lower Mississippi was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and will be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact."

It is not impossible that the magnetic field will go through zero 1200 years from now, but (judging by the past record of reversals) not likely. In any case, the field is not going away: a "flux preservation theorem" suggests this is not happening (at least not on the relatively fast time scale of observed variations of the field; see here). In agreement with that theorem, one finds that while the dipole field is getting weaker, the complicated parts are getting stronger. That's why I wrote "yes and no." During a reversal the two-pole (dipole) component of the field (which now dominates it) may go through zero, but the complex parts of the field will be relatively high, and because of them, while the overall field will be weaker, it won't vanish.

I don't know about migrating animals (they may have magnetic organs, sort of built-in compasses), but there seem to exist no magnetic effects on DNA, resistance to antibiotics and so on; those changes seem more related to chemistry.

Finally, be cautious with compass readings in your house. Houses do contain electric currents and machinery, and these may affect the readings of a magnetic compass. On NASA's satellites the magnetic sensor usually sits at the end of a long boom, to keep it away from interfering electric currents in the satellite's circuits.

Keep up your interest in science!
David