Mountaintop and Extremely Large Telescope

[Derrick Barnicoat]

Like Machu Pichu all over again!!!

[eigoya]

The question of south and north was one I was thinking about yesterday: Whether s/n exist when you are talking about such vastness....Is the knowledge shared, in a scientific consortium or such, or is each site funded by separate (competing) entities? Thanks, this is fascinating, yet the scale makes it difficult to comprehend to a pedestrian mind ( like mine). Thank you

[pahoated]

The funding is very much nationalistic. The E in E-ELT is for European. TMT is mostly American with partners. They are definitely in competition and discoveries are the points. The Eurozone is going all out to outcompete the US on all levels, including putting up their own positioning satellites, taking away satellite launch business, and already schooled American physics withe CERN collider, now planning an even bigger linear collider. Discoveries are shared but after being first to publish.

North and south are relative reference frames used for magnetic poles. From the Earth perspective, the North pole occupies the north hemisphere, the south pole the south hemisphere. The sun has a north and south pole, although they recently flipped. The Earth's magnetic field is weakening rapidly, which happens prior to a geomagnetic reversal, when magnetic south becomes north and north becomes south (not the Earth flipping physically). The last time this happened was 780,000 years ago and all indications are that this is a reversal, the poles are drifting and the field weakens down to zero just before reversing. Computer simulations are providing surprises and indicate this it may take less than 100 years for the poles to flip:
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/75...nal624.jpg

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27941557
Swarm mission makes magnetic maps

"This island Hawaii on this island Earth"

[eigoya]

Yes, my son did a science paper on the polar reversal. Having previously lived in Barrow, AK, this was all news to me! Because or Subaru and UKirk, here, I imagined it was more like the Fermi lab or something (just that there are international physists working together)..... Thanks again.

[TomK]

Eigoya - glad you got some good responses, but now that it's gone from a genuine question about the TMT in Hawaii and the ELT in Chile to pole shifts I think I'll leave the thread alone for a bit.