Carl Friedrich Gauss first measured the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field in the early 1830s when he and his collaborator Wilhelm Weber built a laboratory to study magnetism. They developed methods to measure the components of the intensity of the magnetic field and constructed a magnetometer to measure absolute values of the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Thus experimentally it has only been 190 years since direct measurements have been made. However there has been a lot of discussion and conjecture about the Earth’s magnetic field, both its strength and polarity, over the past history of the planet.
Old Earth geophysicists allege a history going back billions of years, where an internal dynamo regenerates the magnetic B-field intensity. It is the dipole mode that is largely responsible for the current magnetic field and it is this mode that determines the geomagnetic poles, which are offset from or inclined to the planet’s rotational axis.
As a Young Earth biblical creationist I allege a very short history of planet Earth since its creation, no more than 8,000 years. In fact, I would say that that is pretty old, compared to the ages of men.
Recently I have been toying around with models to describe the change in tilt, the obliquity of the rotational axis of our planet. That study led me to a model that shows a correlation between the change in inclination of the Earth’s core rotation axis and past measurements of historical axial magnetic moments for our Earth. Using the old-Earth dates for those measurements I saw an in-principle correlation. As the planet’s core changed inclination with the polar rotational axis over many thousands of years there was a major change in the axial magnetic moment, meaning in the energy stored in the magnetic dipole of the planet.
Please read the following for an introduction:
- Obliquity of Earth’s Axis | How Has It Changed?
- Can We Know the Year of Noah’s Flood?
- Major Changes in Earth’s Magnetic Dipole Since Creation
In what follows, I admit to some speculation. But I try to describe what I believe has occurred since the creation of the planet, in its liquid Iron-Nickel core and its magnetic field.
About 7,500 years ago God created the Earth, the universe and all that is in them. I am not dogmatic on the age as long as it is less that 10,000 years because there is no way you can squeeze any older history into the Genesis account than that. In fact, less than 8,000 years in sufficient if you use the Greek Septuagint as the reference for the ages of the patriarchs.
In the following 2 figures, Figs 1 and 2, I truncate the past time axis at 5,600 BC (-5,600 years). I would argue that there is no history before that time because there was no creation before then. Time didn’t exist.
Fig. 1 shows the change in the Earth’s polar rotation axis since creation; curve (1). This is significant but there were no large changes like some have suggested. The axial tilt moved no more than 1.6 degrees away for where it began at creation. And the change took place over a period of about 4,000 years. At the centre of that time period I place the great Flood in Noah’s day, which occurred at 3154 ± 191 BC.
Fig. 1 also shows the modelled angular change in the Earth’s core rotation axis, called the inclination to the Earth’s polar rotation axis, curve (3). That meant a change of nearly 15 degrees either side of the quasi-equilibrium value, which the Earth’s core has recently come to.
At creation it was not in stable equilibrium. The Earth was created in an unstable equilibrium, if you can call it that, as it changed in both the obliquity to the ecliptic and the inclination of the core.
You may note that where curve (1) crosses curve (2) and where curve (3) crosses curve (4) you have the year of the great Flood.
I suggest the Flood was “baked in” from the creation. God sees the future (Isaiah 46:10) and He prepared all things for His own purposes. It was these changes that were connected with major Earth changes over the past 8,000-year history of the planet. I’ll try to briefly describe some of that history to you.
Now, this is not all speculation! For Dodwell’s historical obliquity of the ecliptic data to so strongly fit to the model I used, with a residual factor R = 0.997 and a χ2 = 0.0143 per degree of freedom, is quite amazing if you believe the data has no value.
From that fit and my toy model of our planet and its core, assuming conservation of both rotational energy and angular momentum, I concluded that the core spin axis had to have shifted by about 9 times that of the planet, as shown in Fig. 1.
Since the liquid metallic core supports a massive electrical current in free decay due to the finite electrical resistance in the core, we can draw a connection to the changes in the rotation axis and the fluid dynamics in the core.
To test the idea of a correlation I found that secular archeointensity measurements of the axial dipole moment from rocks from all over the Earth show a correlation with the change in inclination of the core’s spin axis. I translated the historical Virtual Axial Dipole Magnetic (VADM) moment data into energy in the Earth’s geomagnetic dipole. These are shown in Fig. 2 as the black dashed curve (1) (Dipole Energy). Those data are compared to the change in core inclination, curve (6), right vertical axis. For this figure the large VADM errors are not shown.
In my previous use of this VADM data (see introductory articles), I used the published dates given by the secular researchers. In Fig. 2 I have compressed all dates before 1250 BC with a 26% compression factor. That is, the dates BC are reduced by 26%. Those within the pink rectangle. After 1250 BC I made no changes. This compression brings the first measured datum to 5,500 BC and means an entire history no greater than 7,500 years.
I also make the very reasonable assumption that energy is conserved in the Earth’s magnetic field. Curve (5) illustrates this. All energy in the magnetic modes plus any heat generated must equal the Total Energy (5), dark green. I also assume from the moment of creation, the second law of thermodynamics is operating and heat is generated by ohmic decay of the circulating current in the core. This heat accumulates according to curve (4) (red, Heat Energy).
Curve (1) (dashed black, Dipole Energy) is connected to recent measurements of the dipole near 2000 as calculated by Dr Russ Humphreys. That curve then gives a history of the energy in the dipole for the whole period shown. Though the dates may not be well represented that curve is based on real measured data.
By knowing that the Total B-field Energy in the magnetic field (both Dipole (1) black, and Non-Dipole (2) blue, modes) must decay I modelled such a dependence (curve (3), light green). That light green curve (3) agrees with Humphreys’ calculated value for Total Energy in the magnetic B-field near 2000. By adding to that the Heat Energy (4) generated you get the the Total Energy, dark green curve (5).
The Non-Dipole Energy calculation agrees also with Humphreys’ calculated energy (blue curve (2) near 2000). The energy in this mode was not measured except near 2000 but the gradient matches near 2000. The gradients also match Humphreys data for the Dipole Energy and the Total Energy in the B-field near 2000.
This is where some speculation comes in. But assuming the well-known energy conservation law the unexpected behaviour of the magnetic dipole and non-dipole modes shown in the pink rectangle call for an explanation.
This is how I see it. From creation the core spin axis was changing and half the energy in the magnetic field was in the modes perpendicular to the axial B-field. Those modes are found in the quadrupole, octopole and higher order modes of the B-field. That means significant disturbance in the circulating currents in the liquid core. I could imagine that that caused magnetic polarity reversals as energy swapped between the dipole and non-dipole modes (moments). The period this happened is within the pick rectangle. Near the center of that we had the great Flood, at the time when the core spin axis had returned to but was crossing over its quasi-equilibrium position.
That should have left a lot evidence of polarity reversals in the rocks, which some have stated show up to 50 reversals over geological time. I do not accept the uniformitarian age-dating methods so I would suggest the reversals all occurred over the time line shown in Fig. 2.
Around 3,000 years ago most of the magnetic B-field energy shifted into the axial dipole field. It remained so until about 1,000 years ago when it began decaying with significant heat generation. If you project forward in a linear manner as the black arrow indicates on the Dipole Energy curve (1) it would reach zero in the year 3,000 AD. If you did the same for the Total B-field Energy curve (3) it would reach zero in the year 5,000 AD.
Of course, extrapolation more than a few percent is unreliable. But this is a linear and not an exponential decay as assumed from Humphreys’ data fit to total energy over the period 1900 to 2000. If these trends continue the Earth’s dipole will be gone by 3,000 AD.
God must increase His sustaining power to bring back the magnetic dipole to full strength to sustain this planet into eternity.
Related Reading
- Earth’s Magnetic Field: A Shield by Design
- Can Earth’s Magnetic Field Survive for Billions of Years?
- The Mysterious Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Field Explained
- Earth | A Sphere By Design
- The Sustaining Power of the Creator
- The Physics of Creation | Day 1
- The Physics of Creation | Day 2
- The Physics of Creation | Day 3
- The Physics of Creation | Day 4
- The Physics of the Global Flood
- My Book ‘Physics of Creation’
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