Our Sun operates on a cycle that takes roughly 11 years to complete. While the key indicator for when the cycle is at its peak is the number of sun spots, the root cause is the reversal of the Sun’s magnetic poles. And for some reason that scientists cannot explain, the Sun’s poles are currently out of step with each other:

“Right now, there’s an imbalance between the north and the south poles,” Jonathan Cirtain, NASA’s project scientist for a Japanese solar mission called Hinode, in a recent article on NASA’s website. “The north is already in transition, well ahead of the south pole, and we don’t understand why.”

Further, the asymmetrically reversing solar magnetic field could have an effect on Earth, resulting in increased solar flares and the accompanying bursts of radioactive particles called “coronal mass ejections,” or CMEs, that can hit Earth and cause brilliant Northern Lights displays and problematic geomagnetic solar storms, according to NASA scientists.

“This usually leads to a double peak in the sunspot number and CME rate as a function of time…”

The mismatched poles have been observed before, so the real message here is that the Sun’s activity can vary quite a lot, and scientists have yet to create a model that will tell us what it will do next (according to NASA). The Sun might just surprise us with something later in the year.

Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have suggested that the Sun might end up having four poles, as early as this month:

If that trend continues, the north pole could complete its flip in May 2012 but create a four-pole magnetic structure in the sun, with two new poles created in the vicinity of the equator of our closest star.

Patrick Geryl has suggested that the new four-pole structure could occur during May 13-15 due to a planetary alignment.

Solar Pole Imbalance Mystery is a post from: 2012 Blog

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This is great fodder for Ancient Astronaut theorists. Over in China is a pyramid that has iron pipes within it, and heaps of pipes laying about outside. Like many such mysteries, the pipes could actually be naturally occurring – and Wikipedia cites similar, natural examples. But combined with a pyramid, that’s interesting!

According to Skeptoid, they are fossilized trees, and this seems to ring true (pardon the tree pun)

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Seems that the beautiful theory that either Hipparchus or Archimedes designed the Antikythera device is wrong. The way it works suggests that the concept comes from the Babylonians / Sumerians. Increasingly they are looking like the fulcrum of ancient knowledge…

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Speaking of fossilized trees, adding to the body of evidence for an ancient crustal displacement (aka pole shift) is another forest found in the Arctic, where it could not possibly have grown today.

Baigong Pipes / Antikythera Device / Arctic Forest is a post from: 2012 Blog

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It has become a common feature when the media reports major earthquakes these days – our planet slowed down and was knocked off its axis. While it sounds dramatic, the numbers are minuscule and make no difference in the greater scheme of things:

NASA geophysicist Richard Gross said that the recent Chilean earthquake “sped up the rotation of the earth enough to shorten the day by an estimated 1.26 millionths of a second”, and moved the Earth’s axis by 8 centimetres. And that the 2004 Sumatra quake, which generated the Boxing Day tsunami, would have shortened every day by 6.8 microseconds, with a 5 or 6 centimetre movement.

And now Japan’s megaquake:

The earthquake moved Honshu 2.4 m (7.9 ft) east and shifted the Earth on its axis by almost 10 cm (3.9 in).

These movements, on their own, a curiosity at best. But what if we have multiple huge quakes at once? I’m thinking perhaps several humongous quakes could set-off a chain-reaction. Could they contribute to movements so large that something else is triggered? Could they be have the energy to trigger a crustal displacement? Could this be the trigger for the Rotational Bending hypothesis of James Bowles?

Now there is no scientific basis for my idea, because as far as I knew, earthquakes that occurred prior to human settlements would not have left any traces. But this could change, I just read this at AstroBio.net:

“Current seismographical data on earthquakes only reaches back a century or so,” says Prof. Marco. “Our new approach investigates wave patterns of heavy sediment that penetrates into the light sediments that lie directly on top of them. This helps us to understand the intensity of earthquakes in bygone eras — it’s a yardstick for measuring the impact factor of earthquakes from the past.”

This method paves the way for discovering ancient clusters of large quakes, perhaps sufficient to have triggered a crustal displacement.

Could Earthquakes Cause a Pole Shift? is a post from: 2012 Blog

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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a documentary regarding a pole shift in 2012. The title is a little misleading, 2012 – Countdown to Armageddon, but hopefully will encourage many people to listen to the science behind the pole shift scenario. I’m in the preview below, if you want to check out my accent and our fireplace.

The documentary screens on National Geographic channel this Sunday at 8pm, USA only at this stage.

Rob on Nat Geo – Sneak Peek is a post from: 2012 Blog

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Found at Yahoo Movies:

So how does Roland Emmerich end the world in his upcoming epic “2012″? “Pole reversal,” he said in an interview this week. “All kinds of stuff going on. But it’s basically major earthquakes and volcano eruptions which kind of cause this global flood.”

“We found this obscure theory of ‘Earth crust displacement,’ written in the ’50s by someone called Professor Hapgood. Albert Einstein wrote the foreword to his book. It pretty much [says] every X number of years the whole Earth’s crust shifts, all together. We thought that that was a great underlining theory that can explain why there can be a flood.”

And what is the director going to do in preparation for that fated date? When asked he said, “I’m a pretty down to earth guy. Even [though] I made movies about aliens, I don’t believe in aliens. And I don’t believe that the world will come to an end in 2012, but it’s a great scenario.”

I figure I’ll never know, but I’ve been curious as to whether a visit to Survive2012.com may have played some part in development of the story. And perhaps the idea of surviving on ships from Patrick Geryl?

Emmerich on 2012 Idea is a post from: 2012 Blog

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I’ve been puzzled by this for a long time. On the one hand Charles Hapgood (endorsed by Einstein) gave us the crustal displacement theory (aka pole shift), and found some ancient maps that showed an Antarctica without ice. On the other hand, orthodox science tells us there is plenty of evidence (such as ice cores) that tell us the ice has been there a very long time. And that the trees found buried there were from millions of years ago.

Now we have this from Discover magazine, regarding a recently discovered mountain range deep beneath the ice:

…researchers expected to see a plateau formation, indicating that the peaks had been worn down over millennia. Instead, says researcher Robin Bell: “They are incredibly rough mountains — they look like alligators’ teeth”.

“The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys,” said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey…. He told Reuters that the mountains would probably have been ground down almost flat if the ice sheet had formed slowly. But the presence of jagged peaks might mean the ice formed quickly, burying a landscape under up to 4 km (2.5 miles) of ice . Researchers say that understanding the behavior of polar ice sheets is crucial to scientists trying to predict the impacts of global warming.

Another mystery is the age of the mountains. Mountain ranges like the Alps and the Himalayas formed when continental plates collided, but this range sits in the middle of an ancient chunk of crust, where geologists had thought there had been no major tectonic activity for at least 540 million years…. If the range is indeed at least 540 million years old, then it is remarkably well preserved for its age. Another possibility is that the Gamburtsevs formed much more recently, as a result of volcanic activity. But preliminary results from the expedition don’t show the large magnetic anomalies that would typically be expected when flying over volcanic terrain, says Ferraccioli

Is this evidence for a pole shift?

Antarctic Mountains Prove Pole Shift? is a post from: 2012 Blog

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The phrase “blame it on the weather” takes new meaning in light of research suggesting that regional climate may very well have been responsible for the evolution of lifestyle, culture and even religion in the Middle East.

So says a Discovery.com news item that states that the Middle East, between 11,000 and 10,300 years ago, experienced a period of climate change, becoming colder and more arid. And consequently this created a cultural split between those who went on to live in the new desert, and those who lived in more fertile regions. These cultural differences can be traced back genetically.

Could it be that rather than just “blame it on the weather”, we can theorise that a pole shift was the cause of the major climate change, and that such a cataclysm would have been an additional factor in the emergence of different cultures.

Blame it on the weather? is a post from: 2012 Blog

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This news item at Physical Review Focus:

An asphalt roadway will crack after thousands of trucks pass, even if none is especially heavy. Engineers have long observed that the number of repeated stress cycles before failure is mathematically related to the stress in each cycle. Now in the 7 March Physical Review Letters theorists relate this law to accumulating damage at the microscale.

…Under steady and prolonged stress, microscopic fibers constantly break as they reach their individual damage thresholds, so the material’s lifetime is directly connected with the way in which damage accumulates over time.

…reminded me of the pole shift theory of James Bowles:

If enough tension is happening within our planet, and it is constant, then one day something must give, slip or break. Everything that suffers stress will eventually crack. In our planet’s case it would be the semi-plastic attachment of the crust to the asthenosphere. The stress would also create heat, and this could be a simple explanation for volcanoes – an outlet valve for all the heat created by the stresses within the earth. Bowles points out that an easy way to break a piece of wire is to bend it backwards and forwards, over and over, until it snaps. The ends of the broken wire will be quite hot – heat being a by-product of stress.

It is the most simple, believable idea I have come across for what might what cause a Pole Shift.

Fatigue = Pole Shift? is a post from: 2012 Blog

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The most famous proponent of the “ice cap = pole shift” theory was Charles Hapgood, who in his 1958 book The Earth’s Shifting Crust:

“speculated that the ice mass at one or both poles over-accumulates and destabilizes the earth’s rotational balance, causing slippage of all or much of earth’s outer crust around the earth’s core”

In his 1970 update he changed his mind, and decided that the ice caps could not be the cause, and suggested an unknown internal mechanism of the Earth was responsible.

Ultimately it was a case of the ice caps being too tiny relative to the size and surface of the Earth to make a difference. In fact the relative weights are more akin to a speck of dust on an automobile tyre than anything more serious – and the Antarctic icecap weighs less than one millionth of the entire planet. In these terms the layman can understand why this is unlikely to be the mechanism.

Yet today a reader sent me a news item regarding the Jovian moon Europa:

Curved features on Jupiter’s moon Europa may indicate that its poles have wandered by almost 90 degrees, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution, Lunar and Planetary Institute, and University of California, Santa Cruz in the 15 May issue of Nature.

…The drastic shift in Europa’s rotational axis was likely a result of the build-up of thick ice at the poles. “A spinning body is most stable with its mass farthest from its spin axis,” says Matsuyama. “On Europa, variations in the thickness of its outer shell caused a mass imbalance, so the rotation axis reoriented to a new stable state.”

Now, Europa is 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) in diameter, and the smaller the size, the greater the ratio of ice to weight will be, and therefore the greater the effect.

But still, one has to wonder if after all, a simple case of ice accumulation could cause a pole shift. And if that is that case, could NASA and other top bodies to prepare us for such a possibility?

Could Ice cause a Pole Shift after all? is a post from: 2012 Blog

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