Magnetic pole shift and extinction events.

Apparently we ("modern man") have been tracking the magnetic poles since 1590. Here is a historical tracking of earth's magnetic poles:




LINK

The green circle is geographic north and south poles. The purple through gold circles are the magnetic poles tracked since 1590. As you can see the north magnetic pole is migrating toward Siberia away from the the geographic north pole. The southern magnetic pole is currently almost in sync with the geographic south pole.


Questions:

Apparently the magnetic poles flip about every 12,000 years. Is this time interval correct because I've seen varying time intervals?

This is what the magnetic poles look like during a flip or reversal:



Do extinction events occur during filpage?

I would say potentially yes and here is my hypothesis why. Earth has a magnetic field due to its iron core. The magnetic field shields the earth from solar electromagnetic radiation effectively deflecting most of the solar radiation back into space.

Without the earth's magnetic pole the sun's solar radiation would strip the earth's atmosphere away starting with the lower molecular weight molecules in the atmosphere first. The gas in the atmosphere with the lowest molecular weight is water followed by argon, nitrogen, oxygen then carbon dioxide (which has the highest molecular weight and the heaviest).

During a magnetic reversal the earth's atmosphere would potentially be very vulnerable to atmospheric stripping with water first to go. This would lead to a rapid temperature decrease for two reasons:

1. The loss of mass would decrease atmospheric pressure and by the ideal gas law the temperature would drop.

2. The loss of the lowest molecular weight molecule, water first, would cause rapid evaporation from water on earth's surface. Evaporation leads to plummeting temperatures.

The good news is as temperatures drops water will freeze slowing the loss of water into space during this vulnerable time of a magnetic reversal. It's kind of earth's self protective measure.

The bad news is it's going to be damn cold during the magnetic pole reversal and there may be several extinction events.