Theory Thursday - Supervolcanoes and Pole Reversals

Hey everyone! So today I’m getting back into my Theory Thursday that I had started back in the beginning of last semester before everything had gone to shit. Now that I’m feeling better about this semester (and close to being able to judge the passing of months without referencing “semesters”), I feel like I have the time and mental capacity to get back into blogging. It’s taken me quite a while to find my blogging voice and now that I have, I’m actually enjoying the research behind it. Really, it’s not much different than writing papers for school and Lord knows I’ve done my fair share of those over the past four years! I just have to come up with a new thesis a couple times a week instead of a couple times a month…

Good thing I like to write! Well…on multiple levels considering that I want to be a writer “when I grow up” (lol, on a side note, my kid asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up the other day then laughed because I’m already “grown”. I informed her that I will never, in fact, be “grown”).

Okay, so for those that don’t know, I’m a geology major with a focus on planetary geology and Earth systems processes. I know, shocker. This means that I study the processes on Earth in order to apply these to exoplanets outside our solar system. Since there are only so many elements that can form terrestrial planets, as opposed to gaseous planets, it is acceptable to assume that other terrestrial planets will form under the same relative conditions and through the same processes as those that formed our own. However, in a deeper study, I focus on volcanic processes because it is these that gave rise to life on our own planet, so it’s reasonable to believe that for another to have life, it must also be geologically active (barring some form of aquatic life that formed outside these processes, which in entirely possible given how little we understand about our own oceans).

Something I’ve always been interested in is whether or not pole reversals and supervolcano eruptions are related and today I found an article that goes into that very subject. According to this paper, there are some temporal associations between at least the last pole reversal and a major supervolcano eruption. For those that don’t know, our planet regularly experiences pole reversals where the North and South poles essentially switch positions. This was actually discovered when the Allied forces were using oceanographic radar to look for Soviet subs during WWII. They accidentally discovered bands on the ocean floor that corresponded to these polarity shifts. Using isotopic data, researchers discovered that during the process of reversing, the magnetic field decreased in strength by up to 95%. That’s huge! So for the time it takes for the reversal to complete (which could be hundreds to a few thousand years – we’re not sure), the Earth could be nearly completely defenseless against the relentless solar wind that bombards the planet with deadly radiation. What these researchers hypothesize is that this period of decreased protection could have an effect on supervolcano eruptions and climatological processes, as well.

The reason I bring this up on a writing blog, aside from it being super cool, is the possible fodder for world building. Imagine a populated planet that is undergoing a pole reversal. What kinds of effects will the increased radiation have on the flora and fauna of that planet? What about a future dystopian Earth scenario where this has already happened? How would humans adjust? Would we flee to the stars until it was safe to return or would we disappear underground like moles? How would the increased radioactivity on the surface, and the movement or mass exodus of the people, affect evolutionary processes? If this reversal happens relatively quickly, would humans have time to adapt?

Scientists believe that we are currently overdue for a pole shift now. Some have suggested that the magnetic field has been decreasing in capacity over the past two thousand years, possibly suggesting that the reversal is already underway (I’ll leave that as speculation right now because I don’t have any scholarly evidence to back this up). If so, and looking at how little human technology has advanced since we put people on the moon, is there enough time to prepare for such an event before we start experiencing significant effects? Plus, we don’t even know how deeply this affects the Earth. It could even ramp up the number of earthquakes by warming the inner layers of the planet through radioactive transfer, speeding up tectonics. Really, I could go off about this for a while, but I’ll leave it for now. I think I’ve found enough different ways to use “affect” and “effect” anyway.

So what do you think? What is your take on the science? Would you use this in your own writing? Tell me about it in the comments!

Work Cited:

N.R. Nowaczyk, H.W. Arz, U. Frank, J. Kind, B. Plessen. Dynamics of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion from Black Sea sediments. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2012; 351-352: 54

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