Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip

Earth's magnetic field - the force that protects us from deadly radiation bursts from outer space - is weakening dramatically.

Scientists have discovered that its strength has dropped precipitously over the past two centuries and could disappear over the next 1,000 years.

The effects could be catastrophic. Powerful radiation bursts, which normally never touch the atmosphere, would heat up its upper layers, triggering climatic disruption. Navigation and communication satellites, Earth's eyes and ears, would be destroyed and migrating animals left unable to navigate.

'Earth's magnetic field has disappeared many times before - as a prelude to our magnetic poles flipping over, when north becomes south and vice versa,' said Dr Alan Thomson of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.

'Reversals happen every 250,000 years or so, and as there has not been one for almost a million years, we are due one soon.'

For more than 100 years, scientists have noted the strength of Earth's magnetic field has been declining, but have disagreed about interpretations. Some said its drop was a precursor to reversal, others argued it merely indicated some temporary variation in field strength has been occurring.

But now Gauthier Hulot of the Paris Geophysical Institute has discovered Earth's magnetic field seems to be disappearing most alarmingly near the poles, a clear sign that a flip may soon take place.

Using satellite measurements of field variations over the past 20 years, Hulot plotted the currents of molten iron that generate Earth's magnetism deep underground and spotted huge whorls near the poles.

Hulot believes these vortices rotate in a direction that reinforces a reverse magnetic field, and as they grow and proliferate these eddies will weaken the dominant field: the first steps toward a new polarity, he says.

And as Scientific American reports this week, this interpretation has now been backed up by computer simulation studies.

How long a reversal might last is a matter of scientific controversy, however. Records of past events, embedded in iron minerals in ancient lava beds, show some can last for thousands of years - during which time the planet will have been exposed to batterings from solar radiation. On the other hand, other researchers say some flips may have lasted only a few weeks.

Exactly what will happen when Earth's magnetic field disappears prior to its re-emergence in a reversed orientation is also difficult to assess. Compasses would point to the wrong pole - a minor inconvenience. More importantly, low-orbiting satellites would be exposed to electromagnetic batterings, wrecking them.

In addition, many species of migrating animals and birds - from swallows to wildebeests - rely on innate abilities to track Earth's magnetic field. Their fates are impossible to gauge.

As to humans, our greatest risk would come from intense solar radiation bursts. Normally these are contained by the planet's magnetic field in space. However, if it disappears, particle storms will start to batter the atmosphere.

'These solar particles can have profound effects,' said Dr Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. 'On Mars, when its magnetic field failed permanently billions of years ago, it led to its atmosphere being boiled off. On Earth, it will heat up the upper atmosphere and send ripples round the world with enormous, unpredictable effects on the climate.'

It is unlikely that humans could do much. Burrowing thousands of miles into solid rock to set things right would stretch the technological prowess of our descendants to bursting point, though such limitations do not worry film scriptwriters. Paramount's latest sci-fi thriller, The Core - directed by Englishman Jon Amiel, and starring Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart - depicts a world beset by just such a polar reversal, with radiation sweeping the planet.

The solution, according to the film, to be released next year, involves scientists drilling into Earth's mantle to set off a nuclear blast that will halt the reversal.

Given that temperatures at such depths rival those of the Sun's surface, such a task would seem impossible - except, of course, in Hollywood.

Hmmm, this article is astonishingly late in coming. Dr. Thomas Barnes first publicized this in 1973, and the data was available before then. A recent article on the subject of the rapid decay of the magnetic field can be found here: The Earth's Magnetic Field is Still Losing Energy by Dr. D. Russell Humphreys.

What's worth pointing out is that the claimed timescales (250,000 years, etc.) are wildly out of whack with the empirical data (approx. an 8% decay in only 170 years). The reversals in the magnetic field are reversals in orientation and, as the linked article points out, are distinct from the overall decay in the field strength. Once the field dies down to nothing there is no reason to believe it will ever start back up again. This is the primary finding of the linked article.

I should also point out the reversals happened quickly, not slowly. Humphreys predicted in 1986 that if reversals were rapid substantial portions of a reversal would be recorded in lava flows within the time it took a single lava flow to solidify. Exactly this evidence was found at Steens Mountain (Oregon) in 1989 and subsequently other locations have been reported in the literature, showing the reversals took place in days or weeks. A mechanism for such reversals was later found in the catastrophic plate tectonics work of Dr. John Baumgardner.

We may have a bit more than 1,000 years, too, since the decay is almost certainly logarythmic not linear. Still, the long-range weather forecast is a bit unsettling. ;-p

The culture of the Egyptians appeared full-blown, without any history antedating the First Dynasty. About the year 450 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus journeyed to both Memphis and Thebes on the Nile and talked at length with the priests there about their country and its history.
Herodotus was told by the priests of Memphis that their records went back 11,000 years. If they had survived a cataclysm, wouldn't accounts of it have played important roles in what the priests told Herodotus?
Unfortunately, the Egyptian records were on papyrus and skin scrolls, housed in one of the greatest libraries of antiquity, the Alexandria Library. Much of that library, along with a large portion of its 700,000 scrolls -- the equivalent of 10,000 textbooks of today -- was lost to fire during the reign of Caesar. Nevertheless, the Alexandria Library was rebuilt and continued to be a great repository of ancient records until AD 390. In that year the Bishop of Alexandria, evidently insane and a religious fanatic, led a mob through the streets of the city and pillaged the library of half a million of its scrolls, all of which were burned at his order. Not too long after that, the remainder of the collection was destroyed by the invading army of Caliph Omer.
Fortunately, though, during his visits, Herodotus noted some other very peculiar information passed on to him by the priests... information which heretofore has been discounted as imaginings.
Assuming that an observer in one of the so-called safe areas of Earth at the time of a capsizing were looking at the heavens, he would note a drastic change in the course of the moon, stars and sun. The sun might rise in the south instead of the east, and set in the north instead of the west. Or it might even shift a full 180 degrees, so that the sun would appear to rise in the west instead of the east.
Imagine that at the moment of the last capsizing it was nine in the morning in Memphis. The Earth suddenly began moving sideways even while continuing the normal rotation from west to east. To an Egyptian looking upward at such a time, it would appear that the sun had stopped in its path, then moved about erratically for a while and finally set very close to where it had risen.
An impossible supposition? So it has always seemed. Consider, though, what else the priests of Memphis told Herodotus. They told him with great assurance that in the history of their country, spanning 11,000 years -- or, as they put it, 341 generations (Egypt had by then had 341 kings and a similar number of high priests) -- the sun had twice risen where it had set, without any great change in the productivity of their country!
This heretofore inexplicable statement begins to have considerable relevance. There is a possibility that Egypt was fortunately situated where it could survive two capsizings with little damage. In other words, two capsizings ago, one of the poles was at Hudson Bay. When the capsizing occurred, the area now known as the Sudan Basin became a polar site. The Egyptians then lived in a climate not unlike that of Fairbanks or Reykjavik.
Then another rollover occurred and once again the sun seemed to stand still and then set where it had risen, and what had been a pole became the Sudan Basin of today. The reference by Herodotus to the sun rising and setting twice in the same direction fits into the precepts of the HAB Theory very nicely.
The HAB Theory contends that when a capsizing occurs, the ice caps suddenly move to the equator, and areas which were previously equatorial become sites for the new poles. This goes wholly against long-established geological estimates which, for example, place the age of the South polar ice cap at approximately 13 million years (though these estimates were revised downwards, to 130,000 years, in the mid 1980s).

The shift of the earth's relationship to the sun and the planets in the solar system was recorded in the myths of most civilized cultures. Some accounts are quite specific. Plato wrote in Politicus:

"I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set ... the god at the time of the quarrel, you recall, changed all that to the present system as testimony in favour of Atreus.

He continues:

At certain periods the universe has its present circular motion, and at other periods it revolves in the reverse direction ... Of all the changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the greatest and most complete ... There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives."

Despite being of an eminent pedigree, the above is but one series of accounts. Plato has a lot of interesting things to say, and we may have time to return to a few of them later. Let's look at other myths supporting the theory of crustal displacement or significant changes in the earth's axis. Egypt again, is an excellent source. Pomponius Mela, a Latin author of the first century, wrote:

"The Egyptians pride themselves on being the most ancient people in the world. In their authentic annals ... one may read that since they have been in existence, the course of the stars has changed direction four times, and that the sun has set twice in that part of the sky where it rises today."

"In the second book of his history, Herodotus relates his conversations with Egyptian priests on his visit to Egypt some time during the second half of the fifth century before the present era. Concluding that history of their people, the priests told him that the period following their first king covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and Herodotus calculated that, three generations being equal to a century, the whole period was over eleven thousand years. The priests asserted that within historical ages and since Egypt became a kingdom, 'four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises

Distant civilizations have similar traditions. Mayan legend tells us that;

"... it was not known from where the new sun would appear. They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north, and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct."

The Chinese annals say that in the time of Emperor Yahou the sun did not go down for ten days. The world was in flames, and in their vast extent the waters over topped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods. The water of the ocean was heaped up and cast upon the continent of Asia; a great tidal wave swept over the mountains and broke in the middle of the Chinese Empire. The water was caught in the valleys between the mountains, and the land was flooded for decades.

"In a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring up out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced . . ."
Emperor Yahou sent scholars to different parts of China, and even to Indo-China, to find out the location of north, west, east, and south by observing the direction of the sun's rising and setting and the motion of the stars. He also charged his astronomers to find the duration of the seasons, and to draw up a new calendar."

"In that time the miracle is said to have happened that the sun during a span of ten days did not set, the forests were ignited, and a multitude of abominable vermin was brought forth."

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