Geomagnetic Pole Reversal and 2012
Is there a Connection?
The earth’s magnetic field is weakening and the geomegnatic poles are migrating faster than at any known time in human history. The effects magnetic field variation might have on the earth and her passengers are not completely understood. One effect of the field is to channel incoming solar radiation into the two Van Allen Belts, shielding the earth from the potentially lethal rays. As Joseph E Lawrence notes in Apocalypse 2012, total field collapse or pole reversal is not necessary to cause disaster. The magnetic field has weakened globally 10% since the 19th Century, and gaps have appeared, including a 100,000-mile-wide gap over the South Atlantic. Such weakening could lead to increased disease from ultraviolet exposure, including cataracts and pterygium, growths over the eye, and deadly melanoma. A weaker field would also affect our electronic infrastructure and electric power grids. Several satellites have already been damaged inside the so-called South Atlantic Anomaly.
Interestingly, our uninhabited neighboring planets do not possess a measurable magnetic field. Even earth-like Venus, which probably has an iron core, has no magnetic field. As we will see, motion is a key factor in generating our protective magnetosphere, and Venus, rotating only once every 243 earth-days, just isn’t going fast enough. Without our field’s constant protection, we could never have evolved here.
What other effects a major shift in our magnetic field might have on us is not known. It is well known that migrating birds and salmon, night-flying bats, termites, honeybees, and some mammals that burrow underground, use an internal compass as a ‘sixth-sense’ to orient themselves and navigate. Animal control workers in Florida are preventing endangered American Crocodiles from finding their way back to populated areas by taping magnets to their heads when the animals are relocated. In August 2008, Dr. Sabine Begall of the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showing that behavior in certain large mammals is dependent on the magnetic field. Cows and deer align themselves in a north-south orientation along magnetic lines of flux. What was not widely reported was that Dr. Begall’s group was initially investigating humans, and trying to measure the orientation of tents erected by campers. They switched to cows because their research method, identifying research subjects using Google Earth imaging, was not amenable to tents which are often under trees. Professor John Phillips, a biologist from Virginia Tech, was quoted to say that magnetic sense might be “ubiquitous in the animal kingdom.” This sense is exquisitely sensitive. The strength of the earth’s magnetic field at the planet’s surface averages one-half Gauss. The typical refrigerator magnet is 50 Gauss.
Earth’s geomagnetic North Pole was ‘discovered’ by Sir James Clark Ross in 1831, when his ship was stuck in ice while searching for a northwest passage through the Canadian north. Sir Ross had joined the British Navy at the age of 11. He went on to discover the Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica where he went to find the South Pole (and was disappointed to find land which he couldn’t sail through). He even had a lunar crater named after him. Roald Amundsen next located the North Pole in 1904, and found it had moved 50 km since Sir Ross placed it at the Boothia Peninsula. The pole drifted at an average speed of 10 km per year during the 20th Century, but Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada notes that the pole movement has accelerated, and is now moving at 40 km per year.
Given the source of the planetary magnetic field, we probably should not be surprised that it’s changing and unpredictable. Magnetic fields can be created, or induced, by moving electric charge. An electricity generator, or dynamo, produces current by spinning a rotating coil of wire, or armature, within a fixed magnetic field, or stator. The reverse set of conditions, moving electric charge, or current, will induce a magnetic field. The earth’s inner core, a solid ball of iron slightly smaller than the moon, is too hot to be magnetic. The outer core, however, is a vast ocean of liquid, molten iron covering the ‘planet within a planet’ of the inner core. In addition to spinning, it contains the currents and hurricane-like storms of any ocean, and this movement of this metallic ocean, swirling, turbulent, and conductive, creates the planet’s magnetic field. It is likely always changing, and the paleomagnetic record shows that is has changed much more violently in the past than what we are seeing today.
At several times in the past, the field has completely reversed itself, meandering around until the magnetic North Pole flips to the geographic South Pole, then back again. Currently, the earth’s North Pole is actually a magnetic South Pole, which is why the North Pole of a permanent magnet, like a bar magnet or compass needle, points there. The paleomagnetic record, typically layers of ancient volcanic rock of varying magnetic orientation, shows that geomagnetic reversals occur on average every 300,000 years, but at times has been constant for tens of millions of years, and at other times has flipped twice within 50,000 years. Whether the pole’s current migration indicates the beginning of a reversal is hard to say, as each reversal seems to occur gradually with erratic pole migration over one or two millennia. The last such geomagnetic reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama Reversal, was 780,000 years ago.
There are currently many websites and blogs announcing the “NASA predicts” a pole reversal during the Mayan end date year 1012. It is not always made clear that this prediction is for the magnetic field of the sun, not the earth. Magnetic pole reversal in the sun occurs much more frequently than on the earth, and, in general, reversal accompanies the peak of sunspot cycles every 11 years. As discussed in the essay on Sunspots, a peak of sunspot activity, and therefore pole reversal, is expected during the 2012 Mayan end-date year.
Will geomagnetic field changes be part of a 2012-year dynamic? Science cannot help us here. The brief experience of mankind on this planet does not allow us to predict how changes deep in geologic time, so removed from human history, might affect us, or predict with certainty when those changes might occur. We only know that they will occur again, whether or not we are here to experience them.