This morning I learned that the north magnetic pole is shifting toward Russia at 40 miles per year (I've seen 40 km in some reports, but let's not quibble) and that as a result the airport in Tampa, Fla. is temporarily closing a runway so it can be renumbered.
This isn't news in the sense that it hasn't happened before elsewhere or wasn't expected to happen again. It's news in the sense that many people - including yours truly and I'd venture to guess a fair number of you - were not aware of the connection between the shifting phenomenon and airports.
(It's also news if you use Tampa International Airport, of course - and to a much lesser extent -- because the 2012 doomsday crowd has latched onto it as more evidence of the futility of long-term financial planning.)
From a story on MyFox Tampa Bay:
Tampa International Airport was forced to readjust its runways Thursday to account for the movement of the Earth's magnetic fields, information that pilots rely upon to navigate planes. Thanks to the fluctuations in the force, the airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to change taxiway signs to account for the shift, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Right off the bat, I didn't know that the numbering on taxiway signs was related in to the location of the north magnetic pole. Gold star to those of you who did.
Wikipedia has it covered, naturally:
Runways are named by a number between 01 and 36, which is generally one tenth of the magnetic azimuth of the runway's heading: a runway numbered 09 points east (90°), runway 18 is south (180°), runway 27 points west (270°) and runway 36 points to the north (360° rather than 0°). However, runways in North America that lie within the Northern Domestic Airspace of Canada are numbered relative to true north because proximity to the magnetic North Pole makes the magnetic declination large.
Back to the MyFox Tampa bay story:
The poles are generated by movements within the Earth's inner and outer cores, though the exact process isn't exactly understood. They're also constantly in flux, moving a few degrees every year, but the changes are almost never of such a magnitude that runways require adjusting, said Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA.
The key word there is almost.
So just how often is something like (renumbering runways) necessary? "It happens so infrequently that they wouldn't venture a guess," Takemoto told FoxNews.com. "In fact, you're the first journalist to ever ask me about it."
With just a bit of online searching I was able to learn that it happened in Minnesota in 2002. And, back to Wikipedia: "In July 2009 for example, London Stansted Airport in the United Kingdom changed its runway designations from 05/23 to 04/22 overnight."
So it happens. And chances are it will happen in 2013, too.
(Update: Seems our future demise isn't the only calamity being connected to this shifting business: birds and fish are dropping like flies, according to some speculation.)
(Update 2: This story wades deeper into the doomsday stuff.)
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