The Compost Files: Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting

Quote of the Day:

The oldest & strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
~ H.P. Lovecraft ~

Feel like your running around in circles and can't concentrate? Your not alone. Even the earth, as evidenced by 'wierd weather' and a Gulf Stream that is having trouble staying on it's usual path. The magnetic pole also seems to be in the midst of an 'identity crisis' as reported in an article from Newsday.

By ALICIA CHANG
AP Science Writer

December 9, 2005, 7:28 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO -- Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote. But the shift could mean Alaska may no longer see the sky lights known as auroras, which might then be more visible in more southerly areas of Siberia and Europe.

The magnetic poles are part of the magnetic field generated by liquid iron in Earth's core and are different from the geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of the planet's rotation.

Scientists have long known that magnetic poles migrate and in rare cases, swap places. Exactly why this happens is a mystery.

"This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada," Joseph Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State University, said Thursday at an American Geophysical Union meeting.

Previous studies have shown that the strength of the Earth's magnetic shield has decreased 10 percent over the past 150 years. During the same period, the north magnetic pole wandered about 685 miles out into the Arctic, according to a new analysis by Stoner.

The rate of the magnetic pole's movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries, the Oregon researchers said.

At the present rate, the north magnetic pole could swing out of northern Canada into Siberia. If that happens, Alaska could lose its Northern Lights, which occur when charged particles streaming away from the sun interact with different gases in Earth's atmosphere.

Are you familiar with the writings of Edgar Cayce? He and others like him have predicted a pole shift and various scenarios involving earth changes.

Why is it so hard for some to think these actions of nature are impossible? One word - Uniformitarianism or the theory that science and evolution proceed at a slow and steady pace. The idea that cataclysm could be an instigator for change is frightening. The thought that it could occur within our lifetime is a source of nightmares.

Here is a bit from the link just mentioned to help churn the compost pile.

Both Herodotus and Plato are explicit in saying that the phenomenon is dual natured, that something happens "out there" and the results on the earth are cataclysmic. Herodotus says that it happened four times in an 11 thousand year period, and Plato says that it is an ever-recurring phenomenon.

As also noted, interpreters of these passages generally divide into two groups: the catastrophists and the uniformitarians. The catastrophists suggest that the description is that of a literal 180 degree flip of the earth. Comte George Louis Buffon, an eighteenth century naturalist, proposed a scientific theory of polar shifts to account for the evidence of a warm climate having once existed in the Arctic, as shown by the fossils of trees and tropical creatures. Jean-Jacques Rousseau adopted this idea as an explanation for the evolution of mankind; a pole shift that initiated seasons would force human beings to build shelters, migrate to new lands, develop their skills and so on.

But modern science was rapidly moving away from catastrophism under the influence of Laplace and Lyell. Through their writings, the ideas of the steady-state of the universe and the peaceful, gradual changing of the earth were firmly established in science. It was at this point that the bifurcation in interpretations occurred, and material science established the uniformitarian view, while catastrophism was consigned to the realm of "fringe science" or occultism.

Nevertheless, through an interesting series of events, the "uniformitarian" view made its way into "fringe science" and occultism as well! Such groups explain that the "pole shift" is merely "astrological" world ages based on the precession of the equinoxes. This means that the change of the sun's rising, as described by Plato and Herodotus, relates only to its shift through the signs of the zodiac. So, the sun having moved "four times from his accustomed place of rising" in the allotted period is just noting the fact that the sun has precessed through four signs of the zodiac. [A third view is that the ancients just kept renaming the directions and there was nothing cosmic in these ideas at all, but we aren't concerned with that ridiculous suggestion here.] These "occult uniformitarians" are still active today, as we will see.