Saturday, September 18, 2004

The Bells of Ys Chapter 2

[To Beginning of Story]

Kira

Kira McIlsey was still fuming when she arrived at the research lab, though a part of her quietly (and irritably) commented that there really wasn't any specific compelling reason why she should be so upset. She just wanted to hit something –   anything   –  repeatedly, with a very large baseball bat. Tina, her coffee mate and occasional erstwhile lover when she was in the right mood, didn’t have a clue about how bad things really were. Nobody did. They could not believe that there world was in very grave peril of ending pretty much overnight.

She entered into her own closet, the tiny room that seemed to be standard issue for non-tenured faculty. No doubt when it grew up it had aspirations of being a broom closet. For now it served as the repository for her books, papers and her semi-permanent node into the net. The books, of course, were an anachronism –   the university kept issuing helpful suggestions indicating that faculty could in fact free up space by having their books scanned in   –  but she wasn’t about to give up her ‘real’ books, no matter how much space they ate up.

The system woke up the moment that Kira had walked up to the office, the scanners in the door picking up her retinal pattern and running the correlative checks. It was possible to fool them, of course, Bobbi had shown her a couple of small hand-held devices that would override the scan system, but frankly there were any number of easier ways to hack her data. It was pretty depressing in any respect.

“Show me the Sandstrom cycle,” she said to no one in particular, and on the wall out of the sunlight from the window (not that there had been any sunlight for several weeks to speak of) a view of the Earth appeared from a vantage point of 22,236 miles from a north polar orbit, then splitting into three separate viewpanes. The first was the visible spectrum image, showing a solid mass of clouds with an intricate dance of arrowed vectors indicating air-mass flow. The flow was completely out of keeping with normal June weather patterns, if by normal you use as a benchmark everything prior to 2000.

The second was the same view in the infrared, showing the boundaries of the polar ice cap. The effect was more like looking at a balding man from above, with the bald spot in the center the place where the top of the cap had turned from ice back into water, forming something she thought of as ‘the tonsure’. In essence, there was a sea forming within the polar ice cap, even as the fringes of the cap were shrinking. Already, in the midst of summer, there was booming marine traffic along the polar passage between Japan and London, a passage made far more attractive by the treacherous travel conditions along the newly emergent Panama archipelago. The average American, people all too much like Tina, didn’t realize it because the news agencies had long since stopped covering it, but the very shape of the continents were now changing noticeably.

The final view showed magnetic flux lines around the north pole, drifting in an odd amorphous pattern that, with some imagination, seemed to roughly correspond with the vectors in the first map. What they didn't do were to converge in nice concentric circles around a single point –  the magnetic ‘north pole’ that had guided mariners for millennia. The North Pole was dying.

She had submitted a paper to the appropriate peer review board stating what, to her was the obvious conclusion –  the same conclusion she had voiced to her own meteorology 395 class this morning, though she had no doubt it would get her fired.

“750,000 years ago, the Earth's magnetic field …  for want of a better word, flipped, something that it has done periodically over the course of the last three billion years. The fossil record indicates that there was a diminishment of the viability of the ecosystem around that period, in what amounts to a minor extinction event, or at least a curious void in that same record,” she had said to her class. A few of the more alert ones had looked at her warily, as this was something that did not seem to be on the sylllabus.

“No one really understands why the Earth does this, or what drives it. The nickel/cadmium dynamo theory indicate that it may be due to convection currents causing density differences in the core of the planet, enough to override the dominant magnetic field. The uranium core theory, to which I tend to subscribe, indicates that the Earth's core is in fact made up of a much smaller Uranium core which periodically drowns in its own byproducts, temporarily bringing the heat source in the center of the planet to a halt until the lighter waste products are expunged from the core and fission restarts.

“When this happens, the convection currents will tend to be in the direction of where the new reactions begin, and as this is likely to be at that part of the core which has the least amount of fissile by-products, its very likely that the convection currents will spin in the opposite direction.”

She had lost a few of them on this explanation, making her even angrier. The kids she was getting in her classes seemed to be more and more stupid each semester.

“As the convection currents carry iron, it is the movement of this iron that in turn generates the magnetic fields that protect the earth from solar radiation and also helped sailors navigate, at least until the advent of GPS.”

“Why am I bringing this up?” Kira waved, bringing up a 3D model of the Earth floating to the right of her lectern. “Roughly twenty-five years ago, a magnetic anomaly appeared in the southern Indian Ocean, about four hundred miles to the east of Australia. This anomaly was unusual in several respects. If you think of the North Pole as having positive polarity, and the South Pole as having negative polarity, then this anomaly, located within a couple thousand miles of the South Pole, had a positive polarity. Most anomalies in the magnetic field can be directly attributed to the presence of iron or ferrous deposits (or at least vulcanism) in the region, but this anomaly had no obvious associations with it. This anomaly has been there for a while, about two hundred years, but has been growing in strength at an alarming rate just within the last couple of decades. ”

“At the same time,” she said, drawing her breath and noting with a bit of satisfaction that a few of her brighter students were beginning to put two and two together, “the North Pole has been practically galloping toward Canada, weakening all the while.”

She started the animation sequence showing the globe’s northern magnetic fields bunching up then sliding like an odd amoeba over the frozen wastes into Canada. Another wave brought up two arrows, one more or less aligned with the rotational access of the planet and facing up, the other skewed by thirty degrees, starting from northern Manitoba and coming out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. By now, everyone was paying attention, and a few faces were beginning to show a trace of disbelief. More worrisome, the monitor lights had begun to shine on her podium display –  other people were paying attention too.

“The Earth’s magnetic field is in the process of flipping, right now, after 750,000 years of stability. This means that the Earth’s protection via the Van Allen Belt is basically weakening, increasing the degree of incident radiation landing on the planet, breaking down ozone in the upper atmosphere, and in general causing all kinds of interesting things to occur.”

Mark, good old think-outside-the box Mark, raised his hand.“Professor McIlsey, are you saying that Global Warming is being caused by this magentic switch, rather than by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?”

“Yes,” she replied, almost whispering,“but with a big caveat. 750,000 years ago, human kind looked like glorified orangutans, and the world was, by all indications, at a fairly cool point in it’s cycle. Today, really starting roughly two hundred years ago, human population hit it’s tipping point, we begun to burn large quantities of coal and other chemicals into the air, and we began much of the modern practice of high intensity agribusiness. In other words, we have pushed the ecologic system about as far as we could get away with, but in the normal course of affairs, the climate system would have responded by flushing out much of this from the skies pretty quickly. In other words, we would have returned to the cooler temperatures which have been the trend for awhile.

“We just had the misfortune to do it at more or less precisely that point where the Earth’s magnetic field was changing. This means that we have been seeding the Earth with compounds that have the side effect of holding onto heat just as the ability of the Earth to deflect that radiation has been seriously compromised by the pole switch. This process will likely take a few hundred years to perhaps a few thousand years to completely rectify, as the fossilized older magnetic fields decay and the new magnetic fields strengthen.”

Mark turned green. “A few thousand years?”

“The poles are not aligned with the rotation of the Earth, but are in fact about 30° off. This means that you have a very odd dipole moment which will play havoc with the Van Allen Belt for a while, until the angular momentum is sufficient to overcome that dipole moment and force the two into alignment. So, yeah, a couple thousand years. Meanwhile, the Earth will continue to move farther and farther out of equilibrium.”

The bell had rung then, and most of the students left quickly, looking at her as if she had suddenly sprouted horns. After nearly everyone had left, Mark come up to her, and said quietly, “This is going to be bad, isn’t it.”

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I may be completely wrong …  I hope I am, actually. If I’m not …  yeah, it could be bad.”

He looked at her, a student not all that much younger than she was, big, bearded, someone she suspected would be a good researcher and perhaps might be good in bed, if she swung that way.

“Let me know if I can do anything to help,” he said, quietly, then he was gone.

She watched the door where he had left for a long time, then turned off the display and the lights, and headed off to her coffee date with Tina.


[Chapter 3]


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