Posts tagged as "cap"

Maps For When The Ice Caps Melt and When The Magnetic Poles Reverse

About 2 years ago I wrote about something I called mapping the might have been; things that were planned and made it onto a map but which never came about. Now it's time for the opposite; maps of things that haven't yet come to be but which probably will. It's less mapping the might have been and more mapping the will be.

The planet we live on is one giant magnet, with poles that roughly align with the geographic poles which marks the axis on which the Earth spins. We're used to the notion that North is up at the top of the planet and South is on the other side. But what if these poles reverse? About every half a million years or so this happens and when it does, everything changes and magnetic compasses will no longer work the way we expect them to. When this does happen, maybe the map of the world that we're so familiar with will look something like this.