NCGT Journal of March 2014 – see www.ncgtjournal.com … had a research paper by Robert Johnson, SIS member and author … ‘massive solar eruptions and their contribution to the cause of tectonic uplift.’ It is, after all, a geology focussed journal. Radical geology. The effect on mountain uplift is an interesting subject and the mainstream view seems to be the best we can think of for the moment. It has been integrated into Plate Tectonics theory and of course is considered to have occurred at a uniformitarian timescale. Gradually. The plates moving at a snail’s pace is central to the mainstream mantra. Be that as it may, what grabbed my attention was the role big solar flares may have played in geological formations of one kind and another. In this case, its influence on granite. This is quite pertinent as since that article was published we have had the discovery of Miyake Events – and these have been narrowed down to very big, and unusual, solar flares. Vastly outweighing the strength of even the Carrington event in the 1850s. Having said that there is no evidence any of the Miyake events coincided with mountain building or tectonic uplift. What they do show is that the Sun is not always as quiet as it is currently, in the modern world. If it can produce Miyake events it might also be capable of even bigger solar flares. This seems to be what the author has in mind.
Thomas Gold figures prominently in his thinking – and Han Alfven. Johnson says it is noteworthy that the Earth’s magnetic field is known to have undergone magnetic excursions and reversals as revealed in the geological record. During a reversal, or excursion, the dipole field weakens to the point where the dominant remaining fields consist of the usually weak quadropole and the octupole components. It is possible that an extreme solar event may even have triggered an excursion or reversal by temporarily neutralising the normal ‘dipole field.’ Under a multi-pole condition, discharge currents would no longer be constrained to higher latitudes by the dipole field and could occur between any two multi-pole locations at any latitude, as proposed by Marinus van der Sluijs and Johnson in 2013 [in the Journal of Scientific Exploration v 27 n0 2, pages 227-246]. Could this be what happened at the Laschamp Event, 40,000 or so years ago? Combined with a worldwide compression of the magnetosphere. We might then ask – what was it that caused the mass die offs in the animal kingdom contemporary with the excursion/reversal, and how might this have been responsible for the disappearance of the Neanderthals and Denisovans, replaced not long after by modern humans, living in the same general regions the Neadnerthals and Denisovans had been living in.