by William Hamilton III
2005
from
AstroSciences Website
The earth generates its own magnetic
field which periodically flips polarity over thousands of years.
Paleomagnetism, the magnetic field and polarity found in ancient
rock strata shows this flip has occurred throughout the history of
our planet. Scientists report that such a polarity reversal may
happen in the near future as the strength of earth’s magnetic field
has been declining.
Sometimes the field completely flips. The north and the south poles
swap places. Such reversals, recorded in the magnetism of ancient
rocks, are unpredictable. They come at irregular intervals averaging
about 300,000 years; the last one was 780,000 years ago. Are we
overdue for another? No one knows.
1
Magnetic stripes around mid-ocean ridges
reveal the history of Earth's magnetic field for millions of years.
The study of Earth's past magnetism is called
paleomagnetism.
Image
credit: USGS.
Also from
reference 1:
“Reversals take a few thousand years
to complete, and during that time--contrary to popular
belief--the magnetic field does not vanish. "It just gets more
complicated," says Glatzmaier.
"Magnetic lines of force near
Earth's surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles
pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might
emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti.
Weird. But it's still a planetary magnetic field, and it still
protects us from space radiation and solar storms.”
Above: Supercomputer
models of Earth's magnetic field.
On the left is a
normal dipolar magnetic field, typical of the long years between
polarity reversals.
On the right is the
sort of complicated magnetic field Earth has during the upheaval of
a reversal.
In November 2003, PBS television
presented a special on magnetic storms on its program NOVA. This
programmed focused on the declining state of earth’s magnetic field,
the coming magnetic pole shift, and its potential impact on life on
earth.
But now scientists have made a startling discovery. It seems there's
a storm brewing deep within the Earth, a storm that is weakening our
vital magnetic shield.
-
PETER OLSON (Johns Hopkins
University):
The Earth's magnetic field has been our protector
for millennia, and now, it appears, it's about to go away.
-
JOHN SHAW (University of Liverpool):
The Earth's magnet field is getting weaker rapidly.
-
MARIO ACUNA (NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center):
We cannot guarantee that the magnetic field of
the Earth is still going to be there a thousand years from
today.
-
NARRATOR: Is our invisible shield
about to disappear?
-
JEREMY BLOXHAM (Harvard University):
The question is not if that's going to happen, it's
when that's
going to happen.
-
NARRATOR: Could the Earth really
lose its magnetic field? And what will happen if it does? Up
next on NOVA: Magnetic Storm.
2
The most startling report in this program came from geologist
Rob Coe.
-
NARRATOR: No one has ever
experienced a magnetic reversal. If this is really the beginning
of a flip, what exactly will happen next?
One man who may know, is geologist Rob Coe. For 25 years, he's
been coming to Steens Mountain in Oregon, a vast heap of
hundreds of ancient lava flows.
-
ROB COE (University of California,
Santa Cruz):
Sixteen million years ago there was a huge series
of eruptions here. You can pick out literally hundreds of lava
flows over on that wall. Each line delineates a different lava
flow. It's over 3,000 feet of overlying flows.
-
NARRATOR: What makes Steens special,
is that 16 million years ago, when this lava was erupted, the
magnetic field was in the middle of a flip. Taking samples from
dozens of flows all the way up the mountain, Rob and his
colleagues have pieced together a detailed record of this
magnetic reversal, although it's so surprising that not everyone
accepts it.
-
ROB COE:
What we found as it started
to reverse was the strength of the Earth's field decreased
dramatically, by 80 or 90 percent.
-
NARRATOR: The field started out
pointing south, but as it weakened the direction of the field
began to change erratically. After 300 years, it had swung a
full 180 degrees to point north, and the field strength started
to recover.
-
ROB COE:
But it couldn't hold that
polarity, and it fell back to... reversed and the intensity
crashed again.
-
NARRATOR: Once more the Earth's
magnetic shield practically disappeared, this time for 3,000
years. What was left was changing so fast that Rob found a flow
that captured these wild gyrations even as the lava cooled.
-
ROB COE:
And what we found was even
harder to believe. The quickly chilled margins in the bottom and
the top had one direction, like that of the underlying flow, and
the middle portion had a direction that was sixty degrees
farther away. It was just as though, while the flow cooled, the
field had moved sixty degrees, which if you calculate it out,
that comes to about six degrees of movement per day. If we were
observing this with a compass, you would be able almost to see
the motion with your eye. It was truly astonishing and
extraordinary.
The fact that the magnetic shift
could
happen as rapidly as six degrees per day indicates that the final
phase of a flip can happen in about one month’s time.
Author and researcher Patrick Geryl has concluded that when the sun
flips magnetic polarity in 2012, our own earth will also follow
suit. He says,
“In 2012 the next polar reversal
will take place on earth. This means that the North Pole will be
changed into the South Pole. Scientifically this can only be
explained by the fact that the earth will start rotating in the
opposite direction, together with a huge disaster of unknown
proportions.”
3
Patrick Geryl has written a book,
The
Orion Prophecy, in which he claims that his research of ancient
Mayan and Egyptian codes has enabled him to determine precise dates
in history when previous cataclysms have occurred and gave him the
key to predicting the next cataclysmic event which centers on the
now famous date of the winter solstice of 2012. Has misinterpreted
the codes and is he crying out like Chicken Little saying that the
sky is falling? If so, then we have little to worry about and sleep
peacefully every night until then.
However, as we have seen, there are periodic catastrophes, even ELEs
(Extinction Level Events) that have occurred in the distant past,
but at no time has such event occurred during an advanced stage of
civilization with earth-orbiting satellites as we have today as far
as we know.
Also, we see geological, ecological, and climatological changes
occurring now that seem to be happening at a greater rate than we
have seen in written history except for the legends of
Atlantis and
Lemuria. Some of these changes have already been mentioned in my
essay Cosmic Time Cycles and Clues by Jason.
This is a good reason to examine the possibilities and produce a
reasonable hypothesis as to why such magnetic changes could occur in
the foreseeable future.
“There is strong evidence that the
Milky Way galaxy contains an ordered, large-scale magnetic field
of the value 10-10 tesla (0.1 nT). This field configuration has
been explored in the past through various methods which include
analysis of starlight polarization, modeling pulsar or Faraday
rotation, and Zeeman splitting of hydroxyl masers in regions of
star formations. This Zeeman splitting of atomic or molecular
lines indicated the direction and magnitude of a component of
the magnetic field in a cloud of gas.”
4
The Solar Systems
"Bobbing" Motion
As the solar system orbits in the Milky Way, it has a cycle where it
"bobs" up and down.
This is an "edge-on" view of the
Milky Way. As the solar system goes
around the Galaxy, it has been found that the earth moves up and
down like a horse on a merry-go-round. Following traditional
kinematics, earth would experience the greatest
induced
gravitational forces in this cycle when it changes direction because
the acceleration would be greatest at this point.
This bobbing up and down creates acceleration and deceleration in a
cyclic manner, similar to the classic explanation of a pendulum.
5
I have shown this in my essay
Cosmic Time Cycles and it is an
important clue to the periodic catastrophes that have occurred to
our solar system in the past and makes it possible to predict future
events as the critical points of our solar galactic orbit are the
points where we cross the galactic plane. I have also pointed out
the indication that the precession motion of the earth also points
to lesser cataclysms where we might be reversing our precessing
motion every cycle which indicates changes in the earth’s rotation.
As the earth moves "up" in this bobbing motion, the earth's magnetic
field would be oriented one way -- "north" or "south". As the earth
moves "down" in this bobbing motion, the earth's magnetic field
would be oriented the opposite way -- "north" or "south".
Another researcher states,
“In the year 2012 the earth reaches
an extreme point
in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The open magnetic
field lines at the north pole of the earth will be pointing
towards the sun, receiving a peak amount of solar particles. The
sun's 11-year cycle of activity will also influence earth's
weather more strongly during this time.
Could galactic solstice be contributing to global warming, the
greenhouse effect, and el Nino?”
6
Is the Earth's
magnetic field reversing now? How do we know?
Measurements have been made of the Earth's magnetic field more or
less continuously since about 1840. Some measurements even go back
to the 1500s, for example at Greenwich in London. If we look at the
trend in the strength of the magnetic field over this time (for
example the so-called 'dipole moment' shown in the
graph below) we
can see a downward trend.
Indeed projecting this forward in time
would suggest zero dipole moment in about 1500-1600 years time. This
is one reason why some people believe the field may be in the early
stages of a reversal. We also know from studies of the magnetization
of minerals in ancient clay pots that the Earth's magnetic field was
approximately twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.
The
rapid decay of the earth’s magnetic field from 1900 to 2000
Even so, the current strength of the magnetic field is as high as it
has been in the last 50,000 years, even if it is nearly 800,000
years since the last reversal. Also, bearing in mind what we said
about 'excursions' above, and knowing what we do about the
properties of mathematical models of the magnetic field, it is far
from clear we can easily extrapolate to 1500 years hence.
7
We are already seeing a major extinction event occurring in our
ecosystem as of the date of this writing (September 1, 2005) and
many amphibian species are disappearing. And this happening before
any possible future cataclysm so there is no doubt that the earth is
now changing at an unprecedented rate due to natural and manmade
causes.
This report is written with the intention of alerting everyone to a
potential danger to our biosphere on earth and is not intended to
alarm people. The proper action to take is to prepare for disaster
on a global scale and stop our petty wars and expenditures of money
on accelerating the destruction of our environment. We need to
network and organize people to prepare earth ARKs for the survival
of humanity and civilization in the near future if we intend to
bring balance back to earth and advance to a species that will
eventually produce the technology to explore the universe.
References:
1.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/29dec_magneticfield.htm
2.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3016_magnetic.html
3.
http://survive2012.com/
4.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/RebeccaRudberg.shtml
5.
http://www.grandunification.com/hypertext/Magnetic_Polarity_Flips.html
6.
http://www.vortexmaps.com/htmla/galactic.htm
7.
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/reversals.html
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