Planetary spin cycle

I try not to spend too much time focusing on completely loony ideas here at Skeptophilia.  Wackos are, after all, a dime a dozen, and grabbing the low-hanging fruit is kind of a cheap way to run a blog.  But sometimes I run into a claim that is so earnest, so serious, and at the same time so completely bizarre that it's kind of charming.

That was my reaction when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called Bibliotecapleyades.  I have to admit that I have no idea what that means.  I know that biblioteca means "library" in Spanish, and pleyades sounds a little like "Pleiades," the star cluster that is thought among some of the astro-woo-woos to be the home of the Nordic aliens, who are tall, blond, blue-eyed, muscular, and drop-dead sexy.

Sort of Liam Hemsworth from Outer Space, is how I think of them.

Whether that's the origin of the name or not, I have no idea.  The site doesn't mention aliens, but given the rest of the content, I wouldn't be surprised if it came up at some point.

Anyhow, this particular page on Bibliotecapleyades is called "Earth Changes: Future Map of the World," and goes into how "international known [sic] and respected futurist Gordon-Michael Scallion" has a vision of how the world is going to end up.  And I do mean "vision."  His ideas aren't based on science (big shocker, there) but on his "ongoing visions concerning the Earth" that he experiences "sometimes as many as ten or more in a day, lasting from a few seconds to minutes."  But instead of seeking professional help for this condition, he started writing it all down, and put them all together into a unified, consolidated picture of what we were in for.

You really should look at the website itself, preferably after consuming a double scotch.  It's just that good.  But in case you don't want to risk valuable brain cells going through it, I present below a few highlights of what's going to happen.  Forewarned is forearmed, you know.

1. First, we're going to have a pole shift.  Scallion seems unaware that the position of the magnetic pole and the position of the rotational axis of the Earth are related but aren't the same, so he gets a little confused talking about the precession of the Earth's rotational axis (which is real enough; the Earth wobbles like a top, meaning that Polaris won't be the North Star forever) as somehow triggering a shift in the magnetic pole.  You get the impression he thinks when the poles reverse, the Earth is kind of going to fall over or something.  But he soldiers on ahead, saying that the Earth is going to be like "a washing machine that is out of balance in the spin cycle," and this is going to fling the poles about like damp socks.  Havoc will ensue.
2. Africa is going to fall apart into three separate continents.  Some waterways will open up in a kind of a "Y" shape, inundating large parts of what is now dry land.  Madagascar is going to sink into the ocean.  Don't ask me why.  The Pyramids will also end up under water, but the flipside is that before then, "there will be great archaeological discoveries."
3. The news is more positive for Antarctica, which is going to "be reborn, and become fertile land again."  In addition, the relics of the lost civilization of "Lumania" will be found when the ice all melts, and "great cities and temples will be discovered."  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  In the historical document "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, some explorers went into Antarctica, discovered big abandoned cities and temples, and almost all of them ended up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  So we might want to be a little cautious about investigating "Lumania."
4. The tectonic plate underneath Europe is going to "collapse."  This will cause Scandinavia and Great Britain to sort of slide off the edge into the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The Middle East will be engulfed in war.  For a change.  But this one will be a "holy war with purification of the land by fire and water," whatever that means.  I hope no one tells the End Times folks about this, because they already spend enough time yammering on about stuff like this, and I really don't want to add any more grist to their mill.
6. North America also looks like it's in for a rough time.  California will split up into 150 islands, and the "west coast will recede to Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado."  How that will work, given that Nebraska is east of Wyoming and Colorado, I have no idea.  The Appalachians will be a long skinny island.  At least here in upstate New York it looks like I'll have beachfront property.

He then ends with a disclaimer, a little like the "this preparation is not intended to treat or cure any medical condition" thing you see on bottles of homeopathic "remedies."  He says:

[N]o event or prediction is final.  Predictions are given as probabilities.  Even at this time, consciousness can alter an event, modify changes in a particular area or at the very least help us to prepare for what is to come...  One final note, the areas of change presented in the Future Map of The World should not be taken as absolute.  They may differ from a few miles to several hundred miles depending on many variables.  In the end, Mother Nature and our own collective consciousness will have the final say.

Be that as it may, he provides us with a map of the world showing all of the new land contours.  I'd post it here, but I don't know how Gordon-Michael Scallion feels about the copyright on images he's created, so you'll just have to go take a look for yourself if you want to figure out whether it's time to pack up and move.  Here's a map of what the world looks like now, so you'll have a basis for comparison.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm not concerned.  He didn't provide a timeline for all of these catastrophes in any case, so right now I'm going to worry about more pressing issues, such as how the hell we here in the U.S. ended up with a a twice-impeached, twice-indicted near-illiterate wearing orange spray tan as a serious contender for re-election as president.  Frankly, compared to that, "Lumania" doesn't really bother me much.

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Jerk analysis

Sometimes there are news stories that I have to feature here simply because they're cool.

This one came from some data collected by a mission called Swarm, consisting of three satellites which were launched in 2013 to study the Earth's magnetic field.  The mission is pretty important -- besides being critical to navigation, the magnetic field of our planet protects us from most of the cosmic particles that strike the upper atmosphere.  And -- somewhat alarmingly -- it appears we may be at the beginning of a geomagnetic pole reversal, when the magnetic field of the Earth flips for reasons still poorly understood.  (We know about 183 such pole reversals in the last 83 million years, which is about as long as we have good data for.  The oddest part is that they are anything but regular.  The shortest duration of a particular polarity was around 400 years -- and we've been in the current one for 780,000 years.)

What the current study looked at is a much more transitory phenomenon called a geomagnetic jerk, which sounds like a derogatory name for a geologist, but isn't.  Actually, it's a sort of hiccup in the magnetic field.  They were first discovered in 1978, when there was a sudden increase in the magnetic field intensity followed by an equally rapid decrease, only lasting a few days.  They can be localized geographically, too; there have been jerks that are measurable in North America and invisible in the magnetic field measured everywhere else.

The new study, released last week in Nature: Geoscience in a paper by Julien Aubert (Université de Paris) and Christopher Finlay (Technical University of Denmark) is called "Geomagnetic Jerks and Rapid Hydromagnetic Waves Focusing at Earth’s Core Surface."  It suggests that what's happening is twofold -- there's a slow convection within our metallic core that, combined with the Earth's rotation, gives rise to the magnetic field on the larger scale; but there are much more rapid, turbulent fluid motions, caused by rising blobs of hot liquid metal.  When those blobs impact the boundary between the outer core and the mantle, it results in shock waves that register on the surface as a jittering of the magnetic flux.

Simulation of the magnetic field within the Earth's core

The weirdest part is that the rising of the blobs (which would make a great title for a horror movie, wouldn't it?) begins a good twenty-five years before it registers on the surface as a jerk.  What process creates the blobs is still not understood, but this is at least a step forward.

"Swarm has made a real contribution to our research, allowing us to make detailed comparisons, in both space and time, with physical theories on the origin of these magnetic jerks," said Christopher Finlay, who co-authored the paper.  "While our findings make fascinating science, there are some real-world benefits of understanding how our magnetic field changes.  Many modern electronic devices such as smart phones, rely on our knowledge of the magnetic field for orientation information.  Being able to better forecast field changes will help with such systems."

All of which makes me wonder, however, how we're going to handle it when the overall magnetic field does its headstand, because the theory is that the field first collapses (or becomes highly erratic) before reforming with the opposite polarity.  I have this strangely hilarious mental image of people with their noses glued to the GPS on their cellphones all heading very efficiently to their destinations, and then suddenly they all start wandering off in random directions, never to be seen again.

Of course, it probably won't be nearly that much fun.

Um, I mean, "catastrophic."  "Catastrophic" is what I meant.

Anyhow, it's nice that we now have another piece of the puzzle as far as what's happening in the core of our planet, which -- as always -- turns out to be far more complex than we realized.  As far as jerks and pole reversals, we'll just have to wait to see what happens and find out if the models hold up under scrutiny.

As always.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Planetary spin cycle

I try not to spend too much time focusing on completely loony ideas here at Skeptophilia -- wackos are, after all, a dime a dozen, and grabbing the low-hanging fruit is kind of a cheap way to run a blog.  But sometimes I run into a claim that is so earnest, so serious, and at the same time so completely bizarre that it's kind of charming.

That was my reaction when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called "Bibliotecapleyades."  I have to admit that I have no idea what that means.  I know that biblioteca means "library" in Spanish, and pleyades sounds a little like "Pleiades," the star cluster that is thought among some of the astro-woo-woos to be the home of the Nordic aliens, who are tall, blond, blue-eyed, and muscular.

Sort of Liam Hemsworth from Outer Space, is how I think of them.

Whether that's the origin of the name or not, I have no idea.  He doesn't mention aliens, but given the rest of the content, I wouldn't be surprised if it came up at some point.

Anyhow, this particular page on "Bibliotecapleyades" is called "Earth Changes: Future Map of the World," and goes into how "international known [sic] and respected futurist Gordon-Michael Scallion" has a vision of how the world is going to end up.  And I do mean "vision."  His ideas aren't based on science (big shocker, there) but on his "ongoing visions concerning the Earth" that he experiences "sometimes as many as ten or more in a day, lasting from a few seconds to minutes."  But instead of seeking professional help for this condition, he started writing it all down, and put them all together into a unified, consolidated picture of what we were in for.

You really should look at the website itself, preferably after consuming a double scotch.  It's just that good.  But in case you don't want to risk valuable brain cells going through it, I present below a few highlights of what's going to happen.  Forewarned is forearmed, you know.

1. First, we're going to have a pole shift.  Scallion seems unaware that the position of the magnetic pole and the position of the rotational axis of the Earth are related but aren't the same, so he gets a little confused talking about the precession of the Earth's rotational axis (which is true; the Earth wobbles like a top, meaning that Polaris won't be the North Star forever) as somehow triggering a shift in the magnetic pole.  You get the impression he thinks when the poles reverse, the Earth is kind of going to fall over or something.  But he soldiers on ahead, saying that the Earth is going to be like "a washing machine that is out of balance in the spin cycle," and this is going to fling the poles about like damp socks.  Havoc will ensue.
2. Africa is going to fall apart into three separate continents.  Some waterways will open up in a kind of a "Y" shape, inundating large parts of what is now dry land.  Madagascar is going to sink into the ocean.  Don't ask me why.  The Pyramids will also end up under water, but the flipside is that before then, "there will be great archaeological discoveries."
3. The news is more positive for Antarctica, which is going to "be reborn, and become fertile land again."  In addition, the relics of the lost civilization of "Lumania" will be found when the ice all melts, and "great cities and temples will be discovered."  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  In the historical document "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft, some explorers went into Antarctica, discovered big abandoned cities and temples, and almost all of them ended up getting eaten by Shoggoths.  So we might want to be a little cautious about investigating "Lumania."
4. The tectonic plate underneath Europe is going to "collapse."  This will cause Scandinavia and Great Britain to sort of slide off the edge into the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The Middle East will be engulfed in war.  For a change.  But this one will be a "holy war with purification of the land by fire and water," whatever that means.  I hope no one tells the End Times folks about this, because they already spend enough time yammering on about stuff like this, and I really don't want to add any more grist for their mill.
6. North America also looks like it's in for a rough time.  California will be split up into 150 islands, and the "west coast will recede to Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado."  The Appalachians will be a long skinny island.  At least here in upstate New York it looks like I'll have beachfront property.

He then ends with a disclaimer, a little like the "this preparation is not intended to treat or cure any medical condition" thing you see on bottles of homeopathic "remedies."  He says:

[N]o event or prediction is final.  Predictions are given as probabilities.  Even at this time, consciousness can alter an event, modify changes in a particular area or at the very least help us to prepare for what is to come...  One final note, the areas of change presented in the Future Map of The World should not be taken as absolute. They may differ from a few miles to several hundred miles depending on many variables.  In the end, Mother Nature and our own collective consciousness will have the final say.

Be that as it may, he provides us with a map of the world showing all of the new land contours.  I'd post it here, but I don't know how Gordon-Michael Scallion feels about the copyright on images he's created, so you'll just have to go take a look for yourself if you want to figure out whether it's time to pack up and move.  Here's a map of what the world looks like now, so you'll have a basis for comparison.

[image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm not concerned.  He didn't provide a timeline for all of these catastrophes in any case, so right now I'm going to worry about more pressing issues, such as how the hell we here in the U.S. ended up with a spoiled toddler with orange spray-on tan as the president.  Frankly, compared to that, "Lumania" doesn't really bother me much.

Flipping out

Coming hard on the heels of claims that Comet ISON is an omen of impending doom to humanity is another claim, to wit: the upcoming reversal of the Sun's magnetic field is...

... you guessed it...

... an omen of impending doom to humanity.

Beginning with a site with the cheerful title, The Warning: New Prophecies Reveal Global Events in the Lead Up to the Second Coming, which describes the pole flip as follows:

The closer the Day of My Great Coming draws, the more people, who say they love God, will withdraw from Me. Even those who say they are holy and exalt themselves within the hierarchy of My Church on Earth, won’t be able to see the Truth. They will not see the Truth because they will be so busy attending to matters and ceremonies, which will be insulting to Me.  The first sign will be that the Earth will spin faster. The second sign concerns the sun, which will loom larger, brighter and begin to spin. Beside it you will see a second sun. Then the weather will cause the world to shake and the changes will mean that many parts of the Earth will be destroyed... 

Wars will spread; earthquakes will shake the four corners of the Earth and famine will grip mankind and every wicked gesture and insult made before God will result in a terrible chastisement. When those who accept My Mercy lead My Church – every demon will curse these children of God. To protect them, God will intervene and woe to those who spit in the Face of their Creator.

The time has come. Those who curse Me will suffer. Those who follow Me will live through this persecution, until the Day when I come to sweep them into My Merciful Arms. And then, only those who remain, because they refused My Hand of Mercy, will be given over to the beast they idolized and to whom they sought pleasure from.

So that sounds pretty cheerful.  Then we have this guy, posting on the apparently well-named site Lunatic Outpost:

The Sun starting flip its magnetic field early in May 2012 as ISON was crossing the Orbit of Saturn.

This was the infamous Quadri-Polar issue last year, which when viewed in the lead up to the end of the Mayan Calendar and Comet Elenin swing in was considered an omen of doom.

It was then explained away as the beginning of the solar magnetic field flip which was due in May 2013 the mechanism being that the north pole splits first into a positive end at the north pole and two negative poles at the equator which the link to the positive south pole to form a quadri-polar structure...

While I can't speculate on what this means in terms of major doom it does indicate that ISON has a strong magnetic field with a spherical iron core with a potential for a major electro-magnetic event with the Sun at perihelion...

An interesting number appears if we take Immanuel Velikovsky's rough orbit of Nibiru of 3600 years and round it up to the closest whole number multiple of the 11 year cycle of 3663 years and assuming ISON is Nibiru, it means we are in the 333rd Sunspot cycle which is really a half cycle as the Sun returns to its original polarity configuration every 22 years.

Looking at the quarter cycle of 5.5 years this is the 666th cycle!

Then we have this rather alarming post, on the amazingly wacky David Icke Forum:

Solar flairs [sic], the north pole moving, the weak magnetosphere allows more solar wind into the atmosphere, the tectonic plates are moving much more, we have the earth tilting and springing back on its axis as we can see from the sunset being out of place and its timing. All of these things have a profound effect on our psyche...  are you feeling off lately?

So put the first post, with all the devils and demons and so on, together with the second, with Nibiru and the number 666, and the third, with "out-of-place sunsets," and you have a trifecta of evil that just makes me want to hide in bed under my down comforter.  But of course, given that it's currently 19 F outside, I felt like that already, so maybe that's not all that significant.

Let's put this in perspective, why don't we?  Maybe look at some facts?  Crazy idea, I know, but it might just work!  Space.com did a nice job of explaining the pole reversal, as follows:

Every 11 years or so, the two hemispheres of the sun reverse their polarity, creating a ripple effect that can be felt throughout the far reaches of the solar system. The sun is currently going through one of those flips in its cycle, said scientists working at Stanford University's Wilcox Solar Observatory, which has monitored the sun's magnetic field since 1975.

"The sun's poles are reversing, and this is a large-scale process that takes place over a few months, but it happens once every 11 years," Todd Hoeksema, a solar physicist at Stanford said in a video about the polarity reversal. "What we're looking at is really a reversal of the whole heliosphere, everything from the sun out past the planets."

The polarity reversal probably won't harmfully impact Earth, in fact, it could even protect the planet in some ways, scientists have said.
The sun's huge "current sheet" — a surface extending out from the sun's equator — becomes wavier as the poles reverse. The sheet's crinkles can create a better barrier against the cosmic rays that can damage satellites, other spacecraft and people in orbit, scientists said.

So, the whole thing happens every eleven years?  Meaning I have so far lived through four of these pole flips already, and have yet to be eaten by demons, gone through a "major doom," or observed a sunset that didn't happen exactly when it was supposed to?

Well, that's kind of anticlimactic.

If, like me, pictures help you to understand, take a look at Karl Tate's lucid explanation of the whole thing, where along with great diagrams he tells us the following:

Electric currents inside the sun generate a magnetic field that spreads throughout the solar system. The field causes activity at the surface of the sun, surging and ebbing in a regular cycle. At the peak of the cycle, the polarity of the field flips, during a time of maximum sunspot activity...  The sun is not a solid ball, but rather like a fluid. It exhibits differential rotation, meaning the surface moves at different speeds depending on latitude. This results in the magnetic field lines getting wound up. When the winding gets extreme, the magnetic field lines "snap," causing solar flares at those locations on the surface.

So there you have it.  The Sun is undergoing a field reversal, an event that would only have been noticed by astronomy nerds if it hadn't been for the rather odd subset of humanity who seems to like to look around for Portents of Doom.  The pole flip isn't going to do much to us here on Earth, so you don't need to worry about your refrigerator magnets all falling off, your GPS malfunctioning, or the Second Coming of Christ.

You know what I wish?  I wish that once, just once, we'd go through one of these Omens of Evil Where Nothing Happens, and all of the nutty apocalyptoids would get together and publish a retraction.  "Hey, guys," the retraction would say.  "We were wrong!  The Earth didn't end, after all.  I guess we better go sign up for some science classes!"  But of course, that will never happen.  They take what they do, and each other, way too seriously for that.

It's the deadly serious aspect of it that is honestly what amuses me the most -- because people have been foretelling the future for millennia, and have almost always gotten it wrong, and yet they keep trying.  And people keep believing them.  Myself, I'm more like the Roman philosopher and writer Cicero, who quipped, "I do not understand how two augurs can pass each other on the street without laughing."