2012: It's a Disaster!!!

Arctic Coral and Water Lilies

Spitsbergen (now known as Svalbard) is an island in the Arctic Ocean, just eleven degrees from the North Pole, to the north of Norway. It was uninhabited until the 1890s when a mining colony was established there. For almost six months of winter there is no sunlight, yet fossilised plants have been found there, including pines, firs, elms, swamp-cypress and water lilies.[25] [26] Regardless of climate change, these cannot grow anywhere without regular sunlight. At some time in the past, Spitsbergen must have been further away from the pole. Further evidence comes from Soviet archaeologists who have discovered prehistoric cave drawings of deer and whales, as well as axes fashioned from mammoth tusks.

Reef corals have been found deep within the Arctic Circle, on the islands of Ellesmere (Canada) and Spitsbergen. Under snow now, they must have originally grown in a tropical region.[27] Coral requires a minimum temperature of 64° Fahrenheit to grow, which means either a tropical location, or somewhere outside the tropics where warm currents bring tropical waters into higher latitudes (Japan, South Africa, and Bermuda for example).[28]

At the opposite pole, Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton found coal beds within 200 miles of the South Pole. The Byrd expedition of 1935 uncovered fossils that were later identified as tree ferns, as well as the footprint of a "mammallike reptile".[29] At both ends of the globe, places which are currently the coldest on earth, we find evidence of warmth equivalent to that of latitudes at least 30 degrees closer to the equator.
The Weight of Ice

There is a lot of ice in the polar regions. Antarctica has ice kilometres deep. The weight of this ice, estimated at nineteen quadrillion[30] tons, will surely be compacting the land below, sinking it lower than before the ice existed. If this mass of ice were to have occurred anywhere else on land, a depression would result. Take a look at a map of the world and see if you can spot an area that may have sunk - a circular area, crushed down to sea level or lower. I found two that immediately stood out - Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

Hudson Bay in NorthEast Canada is a large inland sea covering 730,380 sq km, yet has a rather shallow average depth of just 130 metres. It was the epicentre of the North American ice sheet during the last Ice Age, which extended as far south as Ohio. North West of Hudson Bay the subsoil is permanently frozen. Halfway between this region and the current North Pole is Greenland, the interior of which is covered in ice all year long. This is to be expected if it was within the previous polar circle as well as the current one - it never had a chance to melt.

Hudson Bay is roughly 30 degrees south of the North Pole, and the Gulf of Mexico a similar distance south again. These spots would fit a model of regular uni-directional shifts. If the shift had a more random nature then other previous polar locations could include a large depression in Africa called the Sudan Basin. It is littered with waterways, which have no apparent connection to each other, nor with the ocean. It contains Lake Chad, which originally covered 300,000 square kilometres, but is now less than one thirtieth of that size and is still shrinking.

The first two locations just noted are diametrically opposite regions of the Southern Ocean, areas where similar depressions in land cannot occur. Opposite Lake Chad is the South West Pacific, again devoid of major land masses.

The field is similar to that of a bar magnet, but this similarity is superficial. The magnetic field of a bar magnet, or any other type of permanent magnet, is created by the coordinated spins of electrons and nuclei within the atoms. The Earth's core, however, is hotter than 1043 K, the Curie point temperature at which the orientations of spins within iron become randomized. Such randomization causes the substance to lose its magnetic field. Therefore the Earth's magnetic field is caused not by magnetized iron deposits, but mostly by electric currents in the liquid outer core.

Convection of molten iron within the outer liquid core, along with a Coriolis effect caused by the overall planetary rotation, tends to organize these "electric currents" in rolls aligned along the north-south polar axis. When conducting fluid flows across an existing magnetic field, electric currents are induced, which in turn creates another magnetic field. When this magnetic field reinforces the original magnetic field, a dynamo is created which sustains itself. This is called the Dynamo Theory and it explains how the Earth's magnetic field is sustained.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

Changing frequency of geomagnetic reversals over time

The rate of reversals in the Earth's magnetic field has varied widely over time. 72 million years ago (Ma), the field reversed 5 times in a million years. In a 4-million-year period centered on 54 Ma, there were 10 reversals; at around 42 Ma, 17 reversals took place in the span of 3 million years. In a period of 3 million years centering on 24 Ma, 13 reversals occurred. No fewer than 51 reversals occurred in a 12-million-year period, centering on 15 million years ago. These eras of frequent reversals have been counterbalanced by a few "superchrons" – long periods when no reversals took place.[4]

It had generally been assumed that the frequency of geomagnetic reversals is random, and it was shown in 2006 that the known reversals conform to a Lévy distribution.