User:Pointyup

Planet Earth’s Axial Spin To Armageddon. As a people we have only been watching the stars for a short time a few thousand years or so. We have not seen the change in the planets cyclic path because it has been too small over so short a time. What we have noticed is a very slight change in the climate as the planets magnetic cycle swings to the extent of its usual path. We know very little about our planet’s movements but we have noticed that the planet orbits a path around the sun causing the seasonal changes that we call spring summer autumn winter. We know that the planet’s axel is inclined at an angle of around 28deg to the perpendicular gravitational line that connects us to the sun. We know that the magnetic pole moves through roughly a figure 8 pattern at the arctic and Antarctic. There is magnetic attraction as well as the gravitational pull that keeps us in orbit. There are in fact many forces acting on our planet that we are barely aware of. There has lately been some concern over what is known as global warming. This is based on the vague thinking that we are releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere. The planet had a certain amount of carbon when it came to life and nothing has changed since then. There have been ice ages and earthquakes, tectonic movements and extinctions (dinosaurs), meteors and sun spots. But nothing that the earth over time could not recover from. Large meteors like the one that formed the Gulf of Mexico were only a few thousand tonnes. They would give the planet a bit of a shake but then things would settle down again. In fact there have been so many “shakes” that it is impossible to say for certain if there is a pattern to indicate that there actually is any global warming. Ice ages come and go in cyclic fashion every 25000years or so and we are not close to another one at present. There has been a shift in climate severity over the past 30 years that indicate a more severe problem than the melting of ice caps and rising sea levels. It seems that the northern hemisphere is getting colder and the southern hemisphere is getting hotter. Without going into a lot of detail, the easy way to explain it is like this:  The planet is magnetic and is therefore influenced by magnetic fields from the sun and the Milky Way. There has been a long period of stability (our time) and the planet has settled down to predictable orbits and motions. The centre of the planet is still molten and moving about causing changes in the magnetic field that earth produces. The constant movement of lava and magma within earth has the effect of moving the magnetic poles a few degrees in a cycle that resembles a figure 8 at the poles. For nearly a century there has been a build up of ice to huge depths at the North Pole and a corresponding decrease in the ozone at the south pole. This is not a very bad thing because the changes are slow and will only effect future generations in thousands of years time. There have been changes on this scale since before time caused by the tectonic movements in earths crust. The planets crust is not relatively heavy compared to the planet as a whole, and the rotational movement has balanced the movement of crust and the planet has remained stable. Try to imagine a spinning top made of a friable stuff that disintegrates as the top spins. But the disintegration occurs at the lower half close to the point of contact. As long as the point stays intact and only small bits fall of the top remains stable. What happens if the crumbling becomes worse and the top starts to spin out of balance? The top will wobble and eventually stop spinning. It may career out of control in any direction and fall off the table. Disaster. Now we look at earth, and the activities of man. When the meteor created the Gulf of Mexico it was (Comparatively) not very big. But it still caused serious loss of life and species extinction. The meteor created a massive hole but the planet recovered and life went on. The content of the hole stayed where it was, just pushed around a bit. But there is now a far greater threat to the stability of the planet in the form of mining. In particular iron ore. In the past fifty years there has been a surge in iron ore mining of colossal magnitude. Many millions of tonnes of iron ore has been dug out of the ground and moved. As an example Mount Morgan in Queensland has become a deep hole in the ground. Mount Tom Price like wise is becoming a hole of inland sea proportions. It is not the movement of iron ore nor how much iron ore is moved, but the speed at which it is moved. The planet can not keep up with it and is going "out of balance". By itself this would not be any kind of problem but coupled with the tectonic movements (Rift Valley Africa) and shift of weight due to changes in the weather it could become very serious. Added to this is volcanic activity in Iceland which is adding to the overall mass of the Northern Hemisphere (ice melting and refreezing) and ice melting in the Antarctic. The overall effect is that the knife edge that Earth is balanced on is allowing the planet to spin out of its concentricity and spiral to a new type of rotation. Earth's South Pole will point to the sun and spin on its axis in a way that will see that there is no more night and day just constant day for the south and constant night for the north. Near the Equator there will be only slight variations in temperature because Earths axle will not be perfectly pointing to the sun, about 28 degrees of cyclic seasonal eccentric rotation. The South Pole will be permanently very hot and vice versa the North Pole will be permanently very cold well below freezing never seeing the sun. Life will only exist at the temperate zone close to the equator and the planet will only support 10% of the life that it supports to day. There will evaporation and rain fall to be a serious problem of soil erosion. Some of the rain will fall in the frozen zone and the fresh water will be lost but replenished from the ocean. Eventually the planet will change balance again. The change to the planet's balance has already started but it is progressing slowly and there is no need for worry in the short term. The most we can do is to slow the change and look for a new planet to populate. Newton said "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". We cannot move millions of tonnes of iron ore from one side of the planet to the other without changing the state of balance. We don't own the planet; we are a part of it.