happens to equal the average male’s lifespan in the former Soviet Union, meaning that about as many men won’t live that long as will. Back home in Beverly Hills, where everyone is young and lives forever, talk of death is tantamount to hate speech. But in South Africa, about one in five adults, skewed toward the young, will likely die by 2012 anyway, even if the year passes without an apocalyptic peep.
“Thank you, India. Thank you, Providence.”
Back safely aboard the Shark Lady, my mental boom box played Alanis Morissette’s edgy elegy to thankfulness. Her song challenges one to think of new things to be thankful for … metal cages, for one. The great white shark’s indignation at having a gourmet dinner, me, dangled unattainably in front of its nose, reminded me of one of my favorite questions: If God, or some other Higher Power in which you believed, offered to give you exactly what you deserve, no more, no less, for the rest of your life, would you take the deal?
That question goes straight to a person’s self-concept. Most people say they’d take the deal, some agreeing so emphatically that they think it’s a trick question. Of course! Wouldn’t anybody? Folks who pounce on this offer tend to believe that their life, or life in general, is a raw deal. They would welcome “justice” with open arms. Others get pedantic and argue that by definition we all are getting exactly what we deserve, because we deserve exactly what we’re getting. God is just, so however we are treated must therefore be just—that sort of circular reasoning.
Personally I’d turn down the deal in a heartbeat. I know I’ve got it good. Maybe better than I should.
What if this proposition were offered to humanity as a whole? What if the heavens opened up and God/Higher Power/Mighty Space Alien offered our civilization exactly what it collectively deserved? No more, no less. How would you vote? Does humanity deserve all the stress and heartache? All the violence, disease, and degradation?
“24 Children Are Killed in Baghdad Car Blast: U.S. Soldiers Are Said to Be Giving Out Candy, Toys.” According to the report from the New York Times News Service, the soldiers, one killed and three injured, had entered the Baghdad neighborhood to warn residents that there was an explosive device in the area.
On the other hand, do we, the same species that sets off those car bombs, deserve all the wonders of romance, the beauty of Nature, the sweet love of little children? Couldn’t really say who deserves what. But I’d bet heavily that, in a straight-up global vote, the Almighty’s proposition to give humanity exactly what it deserved, no more, no less, would pass overwhelmingly. Why wouldn’t the teeming Third World billions give a thumb’s up to economic justice? Let’s see, people in the West make, say, ten to a hundred times as much money, live 50 percent longer, get to travel, educate their kids, and even get to obsess, as comedian Chris Rock reminds us, about things like lactose intolerance.
Something else new to be thankful for—that I find the prospect of Apocalypse 2012, that bloody-toothed doom crashing its snout against the fragile cage of human existence, bone-terrifying. In Capetown, where I had stayed several nights in a converted prison, I couldn’t help but wonder who might in fact welcome the final cataclysm? No one in his right mind, of course. But then, lots of people aren’t in their right mind, some through no fault of their own. It was easy, sitting in that cell of a hotel room, to imagine a political prisoner so angry and afraid that he or she would welcome destruction, as long as it included the jailers, would welcome perhaps a moment of freedom as the prison walls tumbled down and the very ground beneath them split apart.
As the great white swam off in search of baby dolphins and tasty seals, I recalled having read that there’s a small concentration of iron magnetite in the shark’s brain that enables it to navigate the Earth’s magnetic field. If those cracks get any bigger or the magnetic poles flip, that shark will never find me or any other prey. It won’t know where it’s going.
The Earth’s magnetic field—yet another thing for sharks, and humans, to be thankful for.
SHIELDS DOWN
Hermanus is a picturesque town on South Africa’s southwestern cape. With sheltered coves, this breeding ground for southern right whales is considered the best land-based whale-watching spot in the world.
I had spotted at least ten when Brian, a local bay activist, came over and asked me if I’d like to see the whales closer up. I nodded, and he produced a convoluted instrument, put it to his lips, and blew his own special version of the sound that Gabriel will one day make to signal Judgment Day. After several tortured, bellowing, oddly musical blasts, a half dozen or so whales swam toward us; one, a seventy-tonner by Brian’s reckoning, spouted its hello. He kindly sold me the horn, which he had made out of dried kelp, for forty rand (seven dollars). He then recommended the Shark Lady excursion to me.
“Keep all digits inside the cage,” he advised with a solemn nod.
Brian loves his whales, would rather Jonah’s fate than seeing harm come to them, so I refrained from asking what he thought about the fact that the magnetic field that guides these great whales in their ocean travels from Antarctica to Hermanus and back was weakening. Sooner or later it will dwindle beyond their capacity to sense it. That question was reserved for Pieter Kotze, one of the geophysicists I had come to Hermanus to see.
Kotze is a calm character, a man who fully expects to live a good, long, quiet life. When I visited him at the Magnetic Observatory, a lovely green space on a hill overlooking the bay, the geophysicist hospitably gave me a tour of the quaint laboratories full of state-of-the-art computers analyzing data transmitted from electromagnetic probes buried deep underground. The Earth’s magnetic field originates from the spinning of its molten iron core, which is why the sensors are buried. Kotze asked me if I had any children and what their birthdates were. He then excused himself and after a moment popped back with two seismograph-style readouts of how the Earth’s magnetic field had behaved on the day each child was born.
Kotze’s work is as disturbing as his manner is gentle. He has meticulously chronicled the recent depletion of the Earth’s protective magnetic field. After the tour, he patiently brought me up to speed on what it all means.
We can’t repeal the law of gravity, a good thing, since without also repealing the law of inertia we’d all go flying off the Earth. Neither can we repeal the laws that govern electricity or magnetism. But there’s no law that says the Earth has to have a protective magnetic field shielding us from excessive proton and electron radiation from the Sun that would spur an epidemic of cancers in human beings and many other species, disrupting the global food chain. The glut of solar radiation would also block out cosmic rays, highly energetic particles and waves from outer space that scientists now believe account for much of the cloud formation around the Earth. Clouds, particularly low-lying ones, block out infrared radiation—heat—from the Sun and help keep the Earth’s surface cool.
The Earth’s magnetic field deflects solar radiation and channels it into belts that harmlessly circle our planet’s outer atmosphere. None of our neighboring planets has such a field, at least not nearly to the extent that Earth has currently. In fact our strong, well-functioning magnetic field is not to be taken for granted, particularly because it appears to be in the process of reversing and perhaps diminishing to the point where it will offer little or no defense from the Sun’s depredations.
Traditional geology has it that the Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, is generated by the spinning of the planet’s core, a mixture of molten and solid iron that essentially acts as a Moon-sized dynamo, creating a giant electromagnetic field that squirts out of the poles, coalesces in the same basic pattern that iron filings do around a bar magnet, and bulges far into the atmosphere. Kotze explained that the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), essentially
