Read Online Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves by Bob Berman - Free Book Online
Authors: Bob Berman
Tags: General, science, Essay/s, Physics, Geophysics, Optics & Light, Science / Essays, Science / General, Science / Physics / General, Science / Physics / Geophysics, Science / Physics / Optics & Light
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extinctions. They don’t. The fossil record shows that pole flips never affect the biosphere. Those weren’t even periods of sudden appearances of new life-forms. Evolution wasn’t being prodded in those interchron periods.
Recently there’s been more reassuring news. It seems our magnetic field does not vanish during those centuries when a reversal is trying to establish itself. Rather, many new magnetic poles chaotically come and go, with our field altering its appearance but remaining more or less intact.
Anyway, analysis shows that even without a magnetosphere, our atmosphere blocks most incoming radiation. We’d lose only a frosting of protection. It’s like a professional carpet cleaning—nice but not strictly necessary.
It’s been 780,000 years since the last pole reversal. A long time. Pole flip or no, these have been good years for us mammals. We’re slightly overdue for the next reversal as far as long-term averages go, but we stand nowhere near the fifty-million-year duration record. And when the flipover process starts, it could last for a thousand centuries.
Has it indeed started? One strange fact is that our global magnetic field has become 10 percent weaker since 1850. And the poles are indeed changing position very quickly. But contrary to the beliefs of those who see meaning—usually grim meaning—in the myriad physical events unfolding around us, no one really knows if these are signs of anything. Maybe Earth’s magnetic strength always fluctuates up and down and this 10 percent business is perfectly normal. And maybe the poles sometimes shift position rapidly, sometimes slowly. There’s no way to know if ours is an unusual period.
Even when it does happen, you’d never be able to tell that you were living in an interchron time of magnetic pole reversal without using measuring equipment. Maybe some pigeons would fly confusedly, but that would be it.
Colonel Norm Couturier, commanding officer of Canadian Forces Northern Area, who is the man charged with protecting Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, was interviewed about the runaway North Magnetic Pole for the Edmonton Journal in 2005.
“It’s a force of nature that we’re not equipped to deal with,” he said jokingly.
Admitting that it would be sad to lose the pole, Couturier pointed out that it also has a bright side: with the pole gone from Canada, Canadians have less responsibility for the ill-prepared adventurers who go on half-crazed skiing adventures to reach the magnetic pole.
“It will probably mean now that we’ll have to stage less rescue missions,” he said. “When it was over in Canadian territory, every year we would have to go and assist somebody or recover somebody that was trying to get there. Now that it’s in international waters, a little bit of the pressure is off us.”
There you have it. The runaway pole is making some people happy.
CHAPTER 4: The Man Who Only Loved Sand
And the Curious Phenomena of the Atacama Desert
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, “MOCK ON, MOCK ON, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU” (CA. 1800–3)
The Atacama—a region of utter stillness but occasional strange phenomena—is the driest place on earth. Like its host country, Chile, it tirelessly runs from north to south, occupying a vast expanse centered about twenty degrees south of the equator, the latitude that’s home to nearly all major deserts no matter what continent they’re on. Its main geographic oddity is that it’s narrow: the Atacama begins without preamble at the western base of the Andes and stops suddenly after a mere sixty miles, at the cold Pacific.
Having left the Chilean Andes, I had no choice but to drive into the Atacama. I had exercised questionable judgment, however, by impulsively choosing an untraveled sandy trail that headed north and west. It was designated by the thinnest possible line on the map, snaking along for about seventy miles before it reached a
Recently there’s been more reassuring news. It seems our magnetic field does not vanish during those centuries when a reversal is trying to establish itself. Rather, many new magnetic poles chaotically come and go, with our field altering its appearance but remaining more or less intact.
Anyway, analysis shows that even without a magnetosphere, our atmosphere blocks most incoming radiation. We’d lose only a frosting of protection. It’s like a professional carpet cleaning—nice but not strictly necessary.
It’s been 780,000 years since the last pole reversal. A long time. Pole flip or no, these have been good years for us mammals. We’re slightly overdue for the next reversal as far as long-term averages go, but we stand nowhere near the fifty-million-year duration record. And when the flipover process starts, it could last for a thousand centuries.
Has it indeed started? One strange fact is that our global magnetic field has become 10 percent weaker since 1850. And the poles are indeed changing position very quickly. But contrary to the beliefs of those who see meaning—usually grim meaning—in the myriad physical events unfolding around us, no one really knows if these are signs of anything. Maybe Earth’s magnetic strength always fluctuates up and down and this 10 percent business is perfectly normal. And maybe the poles sometimes shift position rapidly, sometimes slowly. There’s no way to know if ours is an unusual period.
Even when it does happen, you’d never be able to tell that you were living in an interchron time of magnetic pole reversal without using measuring equipment. Maybe some pigeons would fly confusedly, but that would be it.
Colonel Norm Couturier, commanding officer of Canadian Forces Northern Area, who is the man charged with protecting Canada’s Arctic sovereignty, was interviewed about the runaway North Magnetic Pole for the Edmonton Journal in 2005.
“It’s a force of nature that we’re not equipped to deal with,” he said jokingly.
Admitting that it would be sad to lose the pole, Couturier pointed out that it also has a bright side: with the pole gone from Canada, Canadians have less responsibility for the ill-prepared adventurers who go on half-crazed skiing adventures to reach the magnetic pole.
“It will probably mean now that we’ll have to stage less rescue missions,” he said. “When it was over in Canadian territory, every year we would have to go and assist somebody or recover somebody that was trying to get there. Now that it’s in international waters, a little bit of the pressure is off us.”
There you have it. The runaway pole is making some people happy.
CHAPTER 4: The Man Who Only Loved Sand
And the Curious Phenomena of the Atacama Desert
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, “MOCK ON, MOCK ON, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU” (CA. 1800–3)
The Atacama—a region of utter stillness but occasional strange phenomena—is the driest place on earth. Like its host country, Chile, it tirelessly runs from north to south, occupying a vast expanse centered about twenty degrees south of the equator, the latitude that’s home to nearly all major deserts no matter what continent they’re on. Its main geographic oddity is that it’s narrow: the Atacama begins without preamble at the western base of the Andes and stops suddenly after a mere sixty miles, at the cold Pacific.
Having left the Chilean Andes, I had no choice but to drive into the Atacama. I had exercised questionable judgment, however, by impulsively choosing an untraveled sandy trail that headed north and west. It was designated by the thinnest possible line on the map, snaking along for about seventy miles before it reached a
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