Perhaps it’s just the law of averages. Predict enough different kinds of catastrophe, and odds are that some of them will come true. But in the Hutton Commentaries, an unusually scholarly Web site, geologist William Hutton argues that even small shifts in the location of the magnetic poles can have significant consequences. Hutton points out that there are two basic types of pole shift possible: “In the first mechanism, all the layers of the Earth remain together and the axis and the entire spinning globe tilts relative to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun,” writes Hutton. He explains that this type of shift results in the north and south poles moving relative only to the position of fixed stars. This would not result in any seismic or volcanic disturbances, since the Earth’s crust, mantle, and core are not moving relative to each other. Unfortunately this is not the type of pole shift we are experiencing, argues Hutton, because the only movement of the poles relative to the Earth in this scenario would be due to the infinitely slow, millimeter-by-millimeter creep of continental drift.
By contrast, the poles appear to be moving far more rapidly, skittering across northern Canada and Antarctica by 20 or 30 kilometers per year, respectively. Hutton believes that we are experiencing what is known as a mantle-slip mechanism, which refers to the slipping of the Earth’s mantle and crust over the liquid core, or over some malleable surface just above the core. This process could easily cause the “wandering pole” syndrome observed with some alarm over the past decade.
“This type of mantle-slip pole shift also causes the pre-shift equator to move over the surface of the Earth,” writes Hutton. “As the pre-shift equator moves into new regions of Earth’s surface, these regions begin to experience changes in centrifugal forces and sea levels. This leads to new distributions of land and sea, and to crustal tectonic movements.” Such movements, Hutton contends, could presage the kind of seismic and volcanic calamities that Cayce predicted.
Kotze, the South African geophysicist, isn’t so sure that a pole reversal is imminent. Neither is Jeremy Bloxham, of Harvard University, who believes that the process may take a millennium or more. Bloxham nonetheless warns that the weakening of the magnetic field, even well short of a complete pole shift, will diminish its shielding effect. We will be much more susceptible to the radiation constantly bombarding our planet from space, much the way that in Star Trek the starship Enterprise was at its most vulnerable when its shields—energy fields that protected the ship—were down. The Enterprise and her crew always managed to escape immolation, disintegration, and all other consequences of the death rays shot at them, because that’s the way television series go. Of course the Earth and her inhabitants come with no such guarantee of a happy ending.
HOLES
The European Space Agency will send out Swarm, a trio of research satellites that will thoroughly examine the Earth’s magnetic field, from 2009 to 2015. Well before then, scientists better unravel why the field has been cracking for as much as nine hours at a time. The largest, a 100,000-mile crack known as the South Atlantic anomaly, opens up over the ocean between Brazil and South Africa. The danger, quite simply, is that this hole, which may well be the first of many, is a gaping chink in our armor against solar and cosmic radiation. A number of satellites passing through the South Atlantic anomaly have already been damaged by solar outbursts penetrating the diminished magnetic field, including, ironically, a Danish satellite designed to measure the Earth’s magnetic field.
“The more advanced the community is, the more vulnerable it is to the effects of outer space,” declared Kotze in our interview. Kotze is most worried about the vast networks of power grids that keep the world electrified. They are very susceptible to solar outbursts, particularly those now regularly penetrating the South Atlantic anomaly. Blackouts are always inconvenient, and in nations such as South Africa, where there is a high crime rate, they are a threat to social order.
The South Atlantic anomaly is unsettlingly close, just a few degrees north, to the infamous hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica. It could well be that the two holes are related. The dwindling of the Earth’s magnetic field may in fact be causing the ozone layer to dwindle as well. Kotze explains that when proton radiation from the Sun penetrates the Earth’s magnetic shield, the chemistry of the atmosphere is affected: temperatures spike and stratospheric ozone levels plummet.
A brief history of the ozone controversy is helpful here. In the mid 1970s, James Lovelock, a maverick English atmospheric chemist, took his prized invention, the electron capture detector, a palm-sized radioactive ionization chamber capable of sniffing out ionized gases at the parts-per-trillion level, and sailed from Britain to Antarctica and back, analyzing the air along the way. At every point, even thousands of miles out into the open ocean, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were found to be present—gases that are exclusively man-made. Apparently CFCs never decompose. Lovelock published his results in Nature, though with no thought as to what the impact of these peculiar aerosols might be.
Later that year, Ralph Cicerone and his colleague Richard Stolarski of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, drew the scientific world’s attention to how chlorine catalyzes the destruction of ozone, showing how one slippery and promiscuous chloride ion can slide in and out of hundreds of thousands of unstable ozone molecules, lingering just long enough to shred their bonds. In 1974 F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California, Irvine, demonstrated that CFCs, as carriers of chlorine to the stratosphere, were therefore a grievous threat to the stratospheric ozone layer. Rowland and Molina delineated the complex reaction sequence of the CFC destruction mechanism, and for their work they shared, along with coresearcher Paul Crutzen of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Depleting the ozone layer makes the atmosphere more permeable to the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. It is important here to note that the increase in UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface is almost completely a function of the thinning of the atmosphere’s defenses, a thinning caused by man-made gases. One shudders to think of the impact that surging solar UV rays pouring through the Earth’s cracking magnetic field might have on our planet, particularly as we head toward the unprecedented turmoil of the solar maximum projected for 2012.
As most sunbathers have come to know by now, ultraviolet radiation can be broken out into two basic categories: soft ultraviolet (UVA), which does not burn the skin, and hard ultraviolet (UVB), which does. Increasing exposure to UVB radiation has elevated the incidence of skin disorders ranging from sunburn to melanoma and also of certain eye disorders. The health risks are considerable (to fair-skinned people, anyway), but what really hit home in our Sun-worshipping culture was that the Sun was no longer to be revered but feared. It was the end of an era begun in 1920, when Coco Chanel admired the bronzed sailors on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht and then “invented” the fashionable tan by getting one herself. That era climaxed with an impish puppy pulling down the swimsuit bottom of the brown-as-a-berry Coppertone girl, a.k.a. Jodie Foster, exposing her bright white butt.
Now little white butts will burn faster than ever, because more and more cosmic rays are slipping through the Earth’s magnetic shield, shredding ozone molecules in much the same way chlorine atoms do, by splitting the bonds between ozone’s oxygen atoms. Of course, prospective CFC manufacturers might seize upon this finding as an opportunity, arguing that the impact of the dwindling of the Earth’s magnetic field is what has been depleting stratospheric ozone. According to this line of thinking, CFCs may be less harmful than previously thought and therefore needn’t be regulated so stringently. Environmentalists will counter that we should control what we can, in this case CFCs, to control damage to the ozone layer.
Clearly there is an adverse synergy developing between the weakening