Replies

from a file dated Sept 28 1998:

Earth's Changing Orbit Explains Ice Ages
7.49 a.m. ET (1149 GMT) July 23, 1999
[V]ariations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun could explain why ice ages, which occur about every 100,000 years, have not been more regular... Jose Rial, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill... looked at isotopes, or variants, of oxygen found by drilling into the sea floor. Such "heavy" oxygen is found more commonly when it is cold. Rial found evidence of both the 100,000 and 413,000 year cycles, but said they were not so easy to spot because the two "interfered" with each other in much the same way that interfering with radio waves -- a process known as modulation -- allows broadcasters to send information in the form of sound. He said the pattern looked like an FM (frequency modulated) radio wave. He does not know the physical mechanism behind this but says it helps explain why the ice ages seemed to occur at irregular intervals.

Not easy to spot, doesn't understand why it happens, but this help explains irregular intervals. Uh-huh, yeah, right.

Earth throws a wobbly
Tuesday, 18 July, 2000
A mysterious wobble that shakes the Earth as it spins on its axis is caused by pressure changes at the bottom of the ocean, say scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory... The force of the wobble is such that it is capable of moving the North Pole about six metres (20 feet) from where it should be. The Chandler Wobble period lasts around 433 days, or just 1.2 years... Scientists originally calculated that this phenomenon should naturally run out of steam after 68 years unless some force keeps activating it. And this is precisely what appears to happen. Writing in the 1 August issue of Geophysical Research Letters, NASA's Richard Gross says the principle causes of the wobble are fluctuating pressures on the bottom of the oceans. These fluctuations are the result of changes in temperature, salinity and wind patterns. Using data from International Earth Rotation Service, in Paris, Gross says that two thirds of the wobble can be attributed to these ocean bottom pressure changes and one third to alterations in atmospheric pressure.

Yes, that's right, the winds fluctuate pressure on the bottom of the oceans, despite the fact that the mass of the entire atmosphere is the same as the top 35 feet or so of the world's oceans, which are miles deep, and yet are orders of magnitude less massive than the Earth itself.

Earth, The Magic Top
William R. Corliss
Science Frontiers ONLINE
No. 6: February 1979
Employing a wide span of data from complex top theory to ancient legend, Warlow suggests that the earth has undergone many violent catastrophes, some of them within the time of man. Flood legends, geomagnetic reversals, tektites, paleoclimatology, salinity crises, and other familiar standbys of the catastrophists force P. Warlow to examine the stability of the earth in the presence of astronomical collisions and near-collisions.

He shows that the earth rotates slowly and that, even with the stabilizing equatorial bulge, our planet is rather sensitive to outside forces. It is, he says, like a tippe top or magic top; a 8,000-mile-diameter top that turns over repeatedly in response to external influences. Did not the ancient Egyptians write that the sun once rose in the west? Are there not massive faunal extinctions? Have not stray solar-system bodies left scars on all the inner planets?

Y'know, it just seemed like a good idea to juxtapose.