Free Republic

The Earth’s continuously changing magnetic field surrounds the planet like an invisible force field – deflecting highly charged solar particles. Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama, that occurred around 780,000 years ago. A temporary reversal, the Laschamp event, occurred around 41,000 years ago, and lasted less than 1,000 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. Our planet’s history...

Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors Explanation: The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor 15, located in Oklo, Gabon. Uranium oxide remains are visible as the yellowish rock. Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time and distance scales and to develop more effective means for...