Is it me but the water in my toilet bowl now swirls counter clockwise? Am i imagining this? It was always clockwise, wasn't it???
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I'm not sure we have any definitive information on the switch event and how long the process takes. It could be fast or slow, but the time scale is another important question. Does it take minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades or centuries? I don't know if enough evidence has been discovered to know with any certainty. I believe the periodicity of the pole swap was something like every 60k+ years, of course we don't have any human records of the pole shift, so knowing anything with certainty is based on geological evidence and unfortunately our time scales on this type of evidence is not very accurate.
Generally scientists believe that magnetic pole shifts happen approx. every 300,000 years. I'm basing my statement on things I have read in the past about magnetic pole shifts. I believe such conclusions were drawn from volcanic ash and other geological sediments that show ferrous (iron) deposits responding to magnetic alignments before being solidified in situ. And we can see that the current magnetic poles have been slowly meandering for several decades, as shown here: https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/GeomagneticPoles.shtml
Then there is this:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi_ru6exeX9AhVrIEQIHRKbD2UQFnoECBcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2Fearth-magnetic-field-unlikely-to-flip&usg=AOvVaw0rNXPPyu74LGlhgKPjqYeT
I think the problem with our ability to estimate geological core samples is limited by carbon 14 dating inaccuracies. Organic matter needs to be located in the same strata as the reoriented ferrous materials that show one directionality of magnetic alignment over another. The issue is that the time can be estimated by the ratio of decay of the carbon-14 isotope vs the daughter isotope. This is all relied upon with the factor that the carbon-14 amount is consistent on this planet. Unfortunately, we have found that carbon-14 levels are artificially deposited by space debris that impacts the earth. Since the rate of additional carbon-14 deposit on the planet is unknown, it fouls up the calculations and makes the usage of carbon-14 aging unreliable.
The core and rock samples used to detect previous pole shifts did not rely on Carbon-14 dating, as inorganic materials cannot be dated that way...only organic materials (trees, bones, etc.) can be C-14 dated. The geologists who detected the pole shifts did so based on the directions that ferrous (iron, ergo magnetic) were pointing in situ when they were discovered. The ferrous samples pointed in different directions other than magnetic N-S at the time they were discovered.
Yes, this is how they determined there was a pole shift. The strata that the shifted ferrous samples were taken from were used to locate organic matter in the same approximate strata at a site that had organic matter in it. This is where they tested Carbon-14 for dating. Without any organic matter, they would have no way of determining the periodicity of the pole shifts.