At www.ncgt.org/newsletter.php … March issue page 16-37. Johnson describes various theories on the magnetosphere and it inter-action with the solar wind. However, he favours mountain building and uplift being aided by 'super' CMEs, the really big ones that nobody has yet experienced – in the modern world. This is perhaps a drawback but he goes on to claim massive electric discharge currents could activate uplift (augmenting the conventional models of the process). The key here is identifying when mountain building activity took place – the peaks. A major wordwide phase of uplift occurred in the Pliocene/Pleistocene era (which is recent in geological terms). Uplift also occurred, he says, over a relatively short and distinct time. Some kind of 'earth process' switched on following a period of little or insignficant uplift (ollier and Pain, page 303).
One of the corollaries of the article, he says, is that it is no longer necessary to rely on deep sources of heat to produce partial melts – or for long period of time, millions of years, for diffusion of magmatic elements to occur. The timescale for the formation of granite, as an example, could be significantly less that the current consensus opinion. In fact, he adds, the formation of granite will be coincident with the uplift of mountain ranges. The theory does not affect dating methodologies – or on dating past geological events (only the time it takes for those changes to take place).
Telluric currents in the surface layers of the Earth's upper crust are induced by charges in the ionosphere caused by interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. The earth's lithosphere is a natural surface across which electromagnetic coupling occurs via an electromagnetic field (Lazerotti and Gregori, 1986). Anomalous telluric currents arise during electric oor magnetic storms. There is even a correlation of telluric currents along the line of mountains – such as the Southern Rockies, the Canadian Rockies, the Soerra Nevada and the Oregon Highh Cascades. Elsewhere in the world it has been noticed along the Great Escarpment (southern Africa) and the Flinders Range (Australia). The presence of telluric currents is inferred from measurements of geomagnetic variations of the surface. Anomalies occur at the surface due to lateral conductivity variations in the crust and upper mantle. Telluric currents follow the line of increased electrical conductivity.
In Appendix I Johnson discusses whether CMEs are capable of changing earth's orbital parameters. He says that normally this could not happen but it is possible very large CMEs may change the orbit of the earth.