[time-nuts] deeper leap-second trouble ?
Poul-Henning Kamp
phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Jun 19 19:01:26 UTC 2008
As a little challenge: first the danish press release:
http://www.space.dtu.dk/Nyheder/Nyheder_paa_Space.aspx?guid={E29F2AB2-9EBD-407B-AD72-E401F5E0420C}
Here is the article:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n6/abs/ngeo203.html
>From the abstract:
A large part of the Earth's magnetic field is generated by
fluid motion in the molten outer core. [...] Here we show
that changes in the magnetic field occurring over only a
few months, indicative of fluid flow at the top of the core,
can in fact be resolved. [...] We find that the
core flow is spatially localized and involves rapid variations
over a few months, with surprisingly large local accelerations.
[...]
The results mean that the DUT we measure in practice is not guaranteed
to have no high frequency components, it merely happens to not have
(had) them (in the past 50 years).
This is particularly interesting, since the widely accepted theory
that the earths magnetic field is spiralling towards a pole reversal,
mean that the electrical/magnetical field will diverge from the
axis of rotation from now on.
Nobody has any idea what will happen in practice...
Poul-Henning
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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