Compasses going crazy...Theories and Research

I reside in NE FL and I just checked my compass and it points kinda NE ish instead of N so I am having the same problem and just to let you guys know I can read a compass was a Boyscout and a Sailor.

Originally posted by SolarE-Souljah
I don't know if this is relevant or not,

but man I feel like I have vertigo today.

My internal compass feels severely off center. ugh, I feel sick right now.

Anyone else feeling these symptoms?

I have been feeling a little"off" for the last few days.
Sorta disorientated.

Anyways,is there a realtime map of the magnetic lines of declination?
Cause 2010 maps are,just behind the times.
I'm in louisville ,KY and my old boyscout compass seems to be fine,
as I have been here 10 years and have set up a line of sight ,reference point,like where the sun comes up at a point where I
stand on my back porch looking at a nearby hillside,beings I live on top of a hill.
Hope that helps somewhat.
But ,who knows how accurate it is.

Originally posted by SolarE-Souljah
I don't know if this is relevant or not,

but man I feel like I have vertigo today.

My internal compass feels severely off center. ugh, I feel sick right now.

Anyone else feeling these symptoms?

I've had a headache for the past few hours.

I'm pretty sure it's related.

Originally posted by MadDogtheHunter

Originally posted by SirKnightE
reply to post by MadDogtheHunter

 

This SITE supposedly shows the current magnetic north for your location

Supposedly is correct. Heres what it "computed" for my location:

Declination = 11° 28' W changing by 0° 0' E/year

Yeah.....even thats wrong.

Says 17 degrees declanation for Seattle, WA

reply to post by watchdog

Then I told him about this thread and our discussions and he told told me to just quit responding you those of you basically calling the rest of us idiots, because we don't need your validation, you are just a handful of people who aren't seeing what I/we are seeing.

You are the handful. The handful who don't have proper compass reading skills, or broken compasses. Not really unusual when you consider the amount of people on the planet, and the amount of compasses that are out there.

What I find funny is how many of you come posting on a controversial topic website, and then complain about people disagree with you. This isn't about "validation", it's about wanting to curtail the propagation of blatantly incorrect information. To put it another way, it's about denying ignorance.

Hello - newby here, just joined so I could share my compass results... I read about half-way through the thread before I had to start skipping here and there to save time. SO, hopefully someone is still wanting this info.

I'm in North-Western Minnesota - right across the Red River from Fargo, ND (and I agree with the previous poster who said something about increased weather problems and major floods again in the North Midwest - we're preparing for record floods AGAIN, and now we have another major snowstorm heading our way...
not looking forward to that, since it's the official first day of Spring!

ANYway, just wanted to say that my compass appears to be working perfectly, pointing due North, so no anomaly here, but this is really a fascinating thread!! I hope someone is still keeping track and keeping an updated map to chart any patterns... though maybe the fluctuations are so wild that we won't see a pattern...?

Hey,guys,try this site out.
If you can figure out what the data means.
It's INTERMAGNET,data plotting service.
You can plug in your area that is close to an observertory
and check for any changes.
I just found this and haven't had time to play around with it,
so please try it out.
Here is the link..............ottawa.intermagnet.org...

reply to post by coolottie


Do you remember that event with lots of dead birds falling from the sky and dead fish? I watched an interview with some of the people trying to figure out the reason, and some of them came up with a theory that it's because of the Earth poles shifting. Who knows.

just came in here to post something really interesting which might add some fuel to this discussion :

Movement of electrically conducting sea water through the geomagnetic field induces electric fields, currents and secondary magnetic fields (Sanford, 1971). It has long been speculated that tsunamis produce measurable perturbations in the magnetic field (Larsen, 1971; Tyler, 2005). Recent deployments of highly accurate magnetometers and the exceptionally deep solar minimum provided ideal conditions to identify these small signals for the tsunami resulting from the strong Chilean earthquake on February 27, 2010. The magnetic observatory measurements on Easter Island, 3500 km west of the epicenter, measured a periodic signal of 1 nT, coincident in time with recordings from the local tide gauge. The amplitude of this signal is consistent with the sea level variation caused by the tsunami in the open ocean near Easter Island.
Image: Tsunami generated magnetic fields at Easter Island.
Figure. Epicenter and magnetic observatories (HUA, PPT, IPM) on the tsunami propagation map. Maximal tsunami amplitude (color) and tsunami arrival time in hours (grey contours) as predicted by the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research. The red and black triangles show the locations of DART buoys. b) Vertical component magnetic field variations at IPM, PPT and HUA. b-inset) Tide gauge (blue) at Easter Island compared with magnetometer-inferred sea level variation (green). c) Same comparison with time-shifted pressure observations from DART buoy 51406. Periods longer than 1 hour were removed from all data by fitting splines.

The recent magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the Chilean coast (February 27, 2010 at 06:34:14 UTC 35.846°S, 72.719°W) produced a moderate tsunami that traversed the Pacific Ocean westward (see the Figure). Exceptionally quiet magnetic conditions on this day (the planetary index for the magnetic disturbances from sources external to Earth was lowest in its scale during 0:00-15.00 UTC) provided a unique opportunity to verify the hypothesis that tsunamis generate measurable magnetic fields. The newly-constructed Easter Island observatory (code IPM) is located about 3500 km to the west of the epicenter. Further west is Pamatai (PPT) on Tahiti, while the Huancayo observatory (HUA) is situated north of the event in Peru. At the time of the Chilean earthquake, PPT and IPM were recording at a sampling rate of 1 second and HUA at 1 minute. IPM shows a periodic signal of 1 nT in the vertical component (Z) starting at 11:35 UTC. The other two observatories do not show concurrent variations, indicating a local origin of the signal. Commencement of the signal at IPM is coincident with the arrival time of the tsunami predicted by the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Tsunami Research Center. Further west, at 7000 km distance from the epicenter, the tsunami magnetic signal at PPT (not shown) is not easily distinguishable from the background at the expected tsunami arrival time (17:30 UTC). This is to be expected since the tsunami wave height recorded by tide gauge near PPT is one fifth of that recorded near IPM.

The sea level variation due to tsunami around Easter Island can be inferred (Tyler, 2005) from the product of the tsunami-generated magnetic signal (±1 nT) and the average depth of the water column (3000 m in a 2° x 2° area), divided by the vertical component of the ambient magnetic field (19000 nT). Inferred amplitudes of 15 cm are consistent with the wave height predicted from the Method of Splitting Tsunami (MOST, by the NOAA Tsunami Research Center ) model and with bottom pressure variations seen by NOAA’s Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) buoy 51406, 2650 km north-west of Easter Island. A more accurate prediction of sea-level variation from the magnetic field observations requires numerical solution of the electromagnetic induction equation for a tsunami flow model. Recordings of the tide gauge at Easter Island are displayed together with the magnetometer-derived sea level variation in the inset. The tide gauge exhibits the first major crest at 11:50 UTC, 15 minutes after the arrival of the tsunami and commencement of magnetic signals, due to its location on the western coast, in the shadow of the Island. It records higher amplitudes and frequencies, typical for the variation and resonances of a tsunami in shallow water. In contrast, the magnetically derived sea level variation is less affected by local bathymetry and is therefore more consistent with the waveform in the deep ocean.

Magnetic measurements are sensitive to motion in the deep ocean and therefore provide valuable information about sea level variation. The tsunami magnetic signals may be used one day in a monitoring system. A recent study (Manoj et al., 2010) found that tsunamis could also induce observable electric potentials in deep sea cables. In both cases, however, magnetospheric disturbances could limit the practical utility of tsunami electromagnetic monitoring to periods of low solar activity. An immediate application is to use the magnetic inferred amplitude and wave characteristics to understand the tsunami progress in the vicinity.

- geomag.org...

Click here for more information.

reply to post by Byteman


Byteman, I nor anyone else that has posted "anomalies" according to their locations, NEVER said that ours is off so everyone else MUST be off and that the whole world is "off". We simply posted our observations and recordings. In fact I will even go as far to say (like I did in a previous post) that because I live so close to a military base and artillery range that they may have something to do with MY discrepancy. But you came in here, posted that yours was reading normal and accurate and YET I nor anyone else jumped on you and said you were WRONG, that your compass was broken, or you were an idiot and didn't know how to read your compass and that because our readings were off yours HAS to be also.

Now this is just silly. I haven't spoken generalization about the entire world and yet YOU have by saying that "EVERYBODY" elses readings across the world are "normal" So until everybody on the planet comes onto ATS and posts their findings here in ths thread, stop making such global generalizations because YOU my friend cannot speak for the entire world. Absolutely ridiculous!!!

Originally posted by kdog1982
Hey,guys,try this site out.
If you can figure out what the data means.
It's INTERMAGNET,data plotting service.
You can plug in your area that is close to an observertory
and check for any changes.
I just found this and haven't had time to play around with it,
so please try it out.
Here is the link..............ottawa.intermagnet.org...

Excellent source, including many readings all over the world. I just checked every single one for North and South America and none of them shows a significant variation of more than a degree away from usual today, with the most significant variations being near the actual north pole as expected.

reply to post by mrbiggie


Awesome!
And it provides a plug in to see magnetic anomalies for google earth.
Thanks for the link the visual on google earth is cool.

Oh,here is the link........geomag.org...

reply to post by Amberry

Watch this 5-minute clip from the 2003 Hollywood disaster film "The Core," based on the book of the same name:


The core refers to the magnetic molten iron core, which is directly related to the earth's geomagnetic field.

Southern Wisconsin here - Compass is pointing exactly where it should be.

Don't know if I'm relieved or disappointed

Originally posted by mrbiggie
just came in here to post something really interesting which might add some fuel to this discussion :

Originally posted by mrbiggie
geomag.org...

Very interesting. But, please note the following:

* Only when the noise in measurements is extremely low is this effect measurable.

* The variation is of the order of 1 nano Tesla. For comparison, the earth's magnetic field is of the order of 30,000 - 60,000 times larger than that.

So it seems that the recent tsunami can't account for this, as the tsunami is now gone, and the effect is way too small to detect with an ordinary compass.

Thanks for posting the very interesting article though.

Originally posted by XtraTL

Originally posted by mrbiggie
just came in here to post something really interesting which might add some fuel to this discussion :

Originally posted by mrbiggie
geomag.org...

Very interesting. But, please note the following:

* Only when the noise in measurements is extremely low is this effect measurable.

* The variation is of the order of 1 nano Tesla. For comparison, the earth's magnetic field is of the order of 30,000 - 60,000 times larger than that.

So it seems that the recent tsunami can't account for this, as the tsunami is now gone, and the effect is way too small to detect with an ordinary compass.

Thanks for posting the very interesting article though.

sure no problem.
i just noticed that the article wrote about effects noticed in the magnetic field AFTER an earthquak, resulting into a tsunami. i thought before and that changes might be picked up or maybe i should go to bed and get some sleep..

What about a nearby hospital using an NMR machine. The magnets in these can be 2 Tesla according to wikipedia. I'm not too sure of the details though.

Magnetic field strength drops off as the cube of the distance. So I guess you are at 1 microtesla at maybe 100m and 1 nT at 1km say. I've no idea how well these things are shielded, if at all.

I think the world's strongest magnet is something like 40 Tesla give or take an exaggeration here and there.

So a nearby large magnet on the same block as you could conceivably cause a significant deviation. Easy to adjust for though. Walk a few blocks away and take a few other measurements.

reply to post by star child
A lot of people have brought this up, but they have been spraying in this area since the late 1990's. North has always been North until in Early Oct. 2010, I checked the compass because the natives of the Artic region were saying the Sun was not coming up where it use to or something to that effect. My compass then was just 2 degrees off toward the east. When I saw this thread I got the same compass and now N is NE. If I was the spaying I would have noticed before then as my friend does the old North South for everything around here. House had to be Magnetic North on the Dot. Now it is not. His mind is just blown over this thread.

This is absolutely amazing. I am from NW Georgia and my compass (actual compass not an app) instead of pointing north is pointing perfectly east I really hope we find out more about this...