HOLES
The European Space Agency will send out Swarm, a trio of research satellites that will thoroughly examine the Earth’s magnetic field, from 2009 to 2015. Well before then, scientists better unravel why the field has been cracking for as much as nine hours at a time. The largest, a 100,000-mile crack known as the South Atlantic anomaly, opens up over the ocean between Brazil and South Africa. The danger, quite simply, is that this hole, which may well be the first of many, is a gaping chink in our armor against solar and cosmic radiation. A number of satellites passing through the South Atlantic anomaly have already been damaged by solar outbursts penetrating the diminished magnetic field, including, ironically, a Danish satellite designed to measure the Earth’s magnetic field.
“The more advanced the community is, the more vulnerable it is to the effects of outer space,” declared Kotze in our interview. Kotze is most worried about the vast networks of power grids that keep the world electrified. They are very susceptible to solar outbursts, particularly those now regularly penetrating the South Atlantic anomaly. Blackouts are always inconvenient, and in nations such as South Africa, where there is a high crime rate, they are a threat to social order.
The South Atlantic anomaly is unsettlingly close, just a few degrees north, to the infamous hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica. It could well be that the two holes are related. The dwindling of the Earth’s magnetic field may in fact be causing the ozone layer to dwindle as well. Kotze explains that when proton radiation from the Sun penetrates the Earth’s magnetic shield, the chemistry of the atmosphere is affected: temperatures spike and stratospheric ozone levels plummet.
A brief history of the ozone controversy is helpful here. In the mid 1970s, James Lovelock, a maverick English atmospheric chemist, took his prized invention, the electron capture detector, a palm-sized radioactive ionization chamber capable of sniffing out ionized gases at the parts-per-trillion level, and sailed from Britain to Antarctica and back, analyzing the air along the way. At every point, even thousands of miles out into the open ocean, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were found to be present—gases that are exclusively man-made. Apparently CFCs never decompose. Lovelock published his results in Nature, though with no thought as to what the impact of these peculiar aerosols might be.
Later that year, Ralph Cicerone and his colleague Richard Stolarski of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, drew the scientific world’s attention to how chlorine catalyzes the destruction of ozone, showing how one slippery and promiscuous chloride ion can slide in and out of hundreds of thousands of unstable ozone molecules, lingering just long enough to shred their bonds. In 1974 F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California, Irvine, demonstrated that CFCs, as carriers of chlorine to the stratosphere, were therefore a grievous threat to the stratospheric ozone layer. Rowland and Molina delineated the complex reaction sequence of the CFC destruction mechanism, and for their work they shared, along with coresearcher Paul Crutzen of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Depleting the ozone layer makes the atmosphere more permeable to the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. It is important here to note that the increase in UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface is almost completely a function of the thinning of the atmosphere’s defenses, a thinning caused by man-made gases. One shudders to think of the impact that surging solar UV rays pouring through the Earth’s cracking magnetic field might have on our planet, particularly as we head toward the unprecedented turmoil of the solar maximum projected for 2012.
As most sunbathers have come to know by now, ultraviolet radiation can be broken out into two basic categories: soft ultraviolet (UVA), which does not burn the skin, and hard ultraviolet (UVB), which does. Increasing exposure to UVB radiation has elevated the incidence of skin disorders ranging from sunburn to melanoma and also of certain eye disorders. The health risks are considerable (to fair-skinned people, anyway), but what really hit home in our Sun-worshipping culture was that the Sun was no longer to be revered but feared. It was the end of an era begun in 1920, when Coco Chanel admired the bronzed sailors on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht and then “invented” the fashionable tan by getting one herself. That era climaxed with an impish puppy pulling down the swimsuit bottom of the brown-as-a-berry Coppertone girl, a.k.a. Jodie Foster, exposing her bright white butt.
Now little white butts will burn faster than ever, because more and more cosmic rays are slipping through the Earth’s magnetic shield, shredding ozone molecules in much the same way chlorine atoms do, by splitting the bonds between ozone’s oxygen atoms. Of course, prospective CFC manufacturers might seize upon this finding as an opportunity, arguing that the impact of the dwindling of the Earth’s magnetic field is what has been depleting stratospheric ozone. According to this line of thinking, CFCs may be less harmful than previously thought and therefore needn’t be regulated so stringently. Environmentalists will counter that we should control what we can, in this case CFCs, to control damage to the ozone layer.
Clearly there is an adverse synergy developing between the weakening of the magnetic field and the depletion of the ozone layer, resulting in greater threats to human and environmental health. Yet few if any forums regularly bring together scientists specializing in the ozone hole to meet with scientists specializing in the Earth’s magnetic field.
Carlos Barrios had his own take on the dwindling of the Earth’s magnetic field. I asked the Mayan shaman if it didn’t seem somehow suicidal, the Earth dropping its guard against hot lover Sun. Barrios looked at me with a jaded pity reserved for the interminably naïve.
“Have you ever had fungus on your skin?” he asked.
No, but I knew people who had. Lots of itching and bad-smelling lotions and ugly red blotches. “You mean we are the fungus, on the skin of the Earth?”
Carlos nodded that it was certainly possible, then added, “The treatment for skin fungus is to lie out in the Sun.”
As we bobbed in a boat in a cove in the harbor of Heimaey, in southwestern Iceland, Hjalli, the captain, beseeched God’s mercy for twenty minutes, begging that we might survive. We were about to set out for Surtsey, the youngest island in the world, named for the giant in Icelandic mythology who keeps the hellfires burning. When Surtsey emerged on November 14, 1963, the ocean boiled. The crew of a fishing boat in the area was too busy with their nets to notice anything, until a great black column rose out of the water, blotting out the horizon off the bow. Four more years of volcanic eruptions formed the pudgy half-square-mile teardrop, which ever since has refused to submerge, despite being in one of the stormiest places on Earth, with more than 200 gale-force days annually, and waves up to 85 feet high.
From its birth, Surtsey was set aside as an ecological preserve, completely off limits to tourists, with no permanent structures of any kind, including docks or even moorings, permitted. It had taken me a year to get all the permissions to visit, and this after having been personally invited by Iceland’s president, Vigdis Finnboggadottir. But when Hjalli finished praying and then blew his trumpet to let Gabriel know we might be seeing him soon, I wondered aloud whether we shouldn’t just putt-putt around the harbor for a while and agree among ourselves that the Surtsey trip had been, well, beyond words.
My assignment was to write a magazine piece about how Surtsey developed an ecosystem, how a steaming hunk of lava rock surrounded by salt water comes alive. Birdshit, in a nutshell. I understood from the research that ocean-going birds eat fish and poop on the island, providing fertile spots for seeds blown in the wind and washed up from the ocean surface. Sea sandwort, a tenacious green succulent with white and yellow flowers, is usually the first colonizer,
