Shifting Poles, 2012 and More Big Quakes

By now pretty much everyone is aware that the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012, and plenty of people equate that cyclical end as the end of the world as we know it.

There are three views as to the question of whether Earth faces a worldwide cataclysm in 2012, One side says that it's coming and there's nothing you can do about it except stock up and pray. One says there's absolutely nothing to suggest anything sinister and that it's a misinterpretation to think that's what the Mayan calendar portrays. And then there's the third side of the triangle, which encompasses the majority of the population. That group isn't quite sure what will happen, but thinks there's probably at least a little reason to worry.

Pole Shift Theory and 2012

One theory involves pole shift. The principle is this: that the earth's crust - which just happens to be where we live - effectively "floats" atop the molten rock that makes up the planet's mantle. It's a principle already accepted in plate tectonics, the mechanism that drives quake activity. We already know that the surface of the planet is fragmented into multiple continental plates, like enormous puzzle pieces. Those plates duke it out for superiority, grinding against one another where they meet. The hidden property war produces fault lines, which are nothing more than large tears in the surface of the planet. The process isn't slow and steady. When the stress reaches a critical point, the two sides of the plate jerk along fault lines and a quake happens.

The theory of pole shift takes plate tectonics to the next level. Proposed by several people but perhaps most notably by Charles Hapgood in his 1958 book, The Earth's Shifting Crust, the Pole Shift theory proposes that every now and then, stresses exceed the release capacity of any quake. The result is that the entire planetary crust moves at once, slipping over the liquid mantle like loose skin on a piece of fruit.

Recently the National Geographic Channel weighed in on the pole shift question with a presentation called 2012: Countdown to Armageddon. In its documentary, National Geographic broadcast the findings of Dr. Adam Maloof, a PhD from Harvard University who specializes in Earth and Planetary Sciences. Maloff used geologic evidence to prove that a pole shift has indeed taken place in Earth's past. He expressed his interest in the 2012 phenomenon and its possible connection to a real Earth event.

Unfortunately for doomsday prophets, Maloof's findings largely ruled out pole shift as a cause of instant disaster in 2012. His data showed that the previous such event happened over the course of a million years, give or take. That's plenty of time to pack the kids into the station wagon and move to Kokomo ahead of the glaciers.

Pole Shift and 2012: Magnetic Twist

The Earth actually has two sets of poles. One set sits at the the top and one at the bottom of the planet. They mark the of the earth's axis, the infinitesimal spots that effectively don't move as the planet rotates around them.

The second set is the magnetic poles. The needle on a compass points to magnetic north, rather than picking up on the axial north. According to NASA findings, the location of that magnetic pole normally moves around. For the last few years it's been moving at a rate of some 40KM per year and is picking up speed as it goes. NASA reports that the pole occasionally reverses itself, too, on the average about every 300,000 years, though the last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago. While unwilling to predict when the next reversal occurs, NASA does say that the process won't leave us vulnerable to the sun's radiation. The magnetic rules will merely become a bit more chaotic while the transition is underway.

Of course, nobody was around to report on what impact such a pole shift had on plate tectonics. When the poles shifted, did it create heavy quake activity? The answer may not come to us until we witness such an event firsthand.

2012 Countdown: Big Quakes On The Increase

MSNBC recently published excerpts from an interview with Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Baldwin said over the course of the past fifteen years or so, planet Earth has seen an increase in quake activity, particularly in terms of larger quakes.

On the average, one 8.0 or greater quake occurs per year. In 2007 there were four such massive quakes recorded worldwide.

Does that mean 2012 will bring us The Big One, the quake that hits a magnitude of 10 or higher?

A magnitude 10 quake is pretty much impossible. The maximum size of the earthquake depends on the maximum size of its associated fault line. There aren't any known fault lines big enough to support a quake that size. Assuming such a magnitude were in fact possible, its scope of destruction would be unimaginable. Scientists already determined that the 9.1 quake in Indonesia in 2004 caused the planet to wobble on its axis. Keep in mind that a magnitude 10 quake would represent several hundred times the amount of power released in the deadly 2004 event..

That doesn't rule out a big quake altogether. The biggest recorded earthquake was a 9.5 magnitude in chile in 1960. Between the quake itself and its ensuing tsunami, more than 1800 people died, 3000 were injured and 2 million were left homeless. The day a comparably sized temblor occurs in the mid-Atlantic, resulting in a massive tsunami swamping major coastal centers on four continents, all bets are off.

So Why Do We Care About Pole Shifts and Quakes?

Like everything else that happened in ancient history, our view is distorted by the limits of our geological understanding. While Dr. Maloof's findings showed that the total pole shift was spread over a great deal of time, there was no way to see how it impacted the planet on a day-to-day basis. Was the transition so subtle as to be unnoticeable? Or, like big quakes, did the slippage of the pole shift happen in jagged "jumps" of the planet's crust?

If the latter, it would almost certainly translate into corresponding earthquakes ravaging the surface.