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?
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.
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.
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.
This report is written with the intention of alerting
everyone to a potential danger to our biosphere on earth.
The proper action to take is to prepare for disaster
on a global scale and stop our petty wars. We need to
network and organize people to prepare earth ARKs for
the survival of humanity and civilization in the near
future.
|
