“A Pothole in Space”

NASA Keeping Tabs on the Growing Rip in Earth’s Magnetic Field

“Although the South Atlantic Anomaly arises from processes inside Earth, it has effects that reach far beyond Earth’s surface. The region can be hazardous for low-Earth orbit satellites that travel through it. If a satellite is hit by a high-energy proton, it can short-circuit and cause an event called single event upset or SEU. This can cause the satellite’s function to glitch temporarily or can cause permanent damage if a key component is hit. In order to avoid losing instruments or an entire satellite, operators commonly shut down non-essential components as they pass through the SAA.”

The European Space Agency (ESA) weighed in earlier this year about the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) – the mysterious dent in Earth’s magnetic field over the South Atlantic that is being weakened to the point of splitting apart by the planet’s molten metal outer core churning around and shifting old tectonic plates on top of each other so that they block the outer core from forming the magnetic field. Now NASA decided it’s time to reveal its concern about the SAA and how it’s affected NASA’s moneymakers – satellites.

In a press release accompanying an explanatory video (watch it here), NASA scientists explain how the SAA is like “a pothole in space,” jarring satellites every time they pass over it, causing electronic glitches, short circuits and other physical damage. And no, they can’t just fly around it because the SAA is far too big and a detour would make the area of missed communications even larger.

“In addition to measuring the SAA’s magnetic field strength, NASA scientists have also studied the particle radiation in the region with the Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer, or SAMPEX – the first of NASA’s Small Explorer missions, launched in 1992 and providing observations until 2012.”

Even though the rip keeps getting bigger, NASA appears less concerned about what’s directly underneath it on the surface, so it seems to imply that the increased solar radiation is nothing to worry about … yet. It can still affect ships and planes passing through, but the worst part is that the anomaly is “slowly but steadily drifting in a northwesterly direction.” You don’t need Google maps (although you might want to use them while you still can) to figure out that ‘northwest’ is the direction of South and North America. However, the press release still refers to the South Atlantic Anomaly as a “dent” and focuses primarily on “Modeling a safer future for satellites” – where NASA and SpaceX make their money.

Cynical? Yes. The SAA is obviously more than a “pothole in space” to be getting this kind of attention.

from:    https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/08/nasa-keeping-tabs-on-the-growing-rip-in-earths-magnetic-field/

Of Gyrocompasses, Electronic Warfare, and Pole Shifts

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WHY ARE SHIPS AT SEA GOING IN CIRCLES?

June 9, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

Now here’s one that has my high octane speculation and suspicion meter in the red zone. It was spotted and shared by E.K., and it raises all sorts of questions, for it seems that ships at sea have been sailing in circles, and no one, apparently, knows why. Here’s the story:

A maritime mystery: What has been causing ships to sail in circles?

As the article notes, ships sailing in circles – often unbeknownst to their crews (we’ll get back to that) – has been a growing phenomenon, particularly in Chinese waters, and as the article avers, one immediate suspicion is electronic warfare and the deliberate interference and manipulation of GPS data:

Ships appearing to sail in circles have become an increasingly common and mysterious phenomenon near a number of ports on the coast of China, especially near oil terminals and government facilities – but nothing had been seen where the Willowy was.

Researchers monitoring these bizarre circles near the Chinese coast believe they are probably the result of systematic GPS manipulation designed to undermine a tracking system which all commercial ships are required to use under international law.

The circles spotted near the Chinese coast have been attributed to GPS interference, something which coincided with US sanctions on Iran, according to Phil Diacon, the chief executive of marine intelligence firm Dryad Global.

This immediately made me think of the USS Fitrzgerald and USS John McCain incidents, where two American warships, one in Japanese waters (the Fitzgerald) and the other in the busy waters around Singapore (the McCain), suffered collisions with civilian vessels, in spite of the latest in electronic detection and warfare equipment. I said then, and maintain still (and in spite of friendly efforts from ex-US Navy personnel to dissuade me), that these were not accidents, but perhaps the result of electronic warfare of some sort. I’ve even gone so far as to entertain the possibility that some sort of mind-manipulation technology may have been used not only on the crews of the American warships, but perhaps also on the crews of the civilian vessels with which they collided.

The problem with that explanation here is that the latest episodes occur far from waters in which China would be interested:

But according to a global analysis of this data by environmental groups SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, a number of circling incidents have also occurred quite a distance away from Chinese ports, with some impossibly appearing miles inland near San Francisco.

SkyTruth found the real locations of these ships often thousands of miles away from the circular sailing tracks. The ships were again were often actually near oil terminals or in locations where GPS disruption had been reported before.

In this case, a Liberian flagged vessel began to show some unusual behavior:

At approximately 1am on Sunday morning, the Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker, operated by Singaporean business Executive Ship, suddenly swung starboard and began actually sailing in circles.

The ship was unable to steer and the crew reported that four other vessels in its vicinity were caught in a similar spiral, slowly converging on each other for an unknown reason.

There are suggestions that GPS jamming has been used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to dupe commercial vessels into entering Iranian waters, and Chinese electronic warfare capabilities have been proposed as a potential cause for some ships appearing thousands of miles away from where they really were.

The crew aboard the Willowy were aware of these issues but none of these risks could be feasible west of Cape Town – a long way from the Strait of Hormuz or the contested South China Sea.

So what’s the explanation here? The article offers the South Atlantic magnetic anomaly and the weakening magnetic field of the Earth as a possible hypothesis:

But the European Space Agency has detected something else there.

Nobody knows why, but the Earth’s magnetic field – which has lost almost 10% of its strength over the last two centuries – is growing particularly weak in a large region stretching from Africa to South America, impacting satellites and spacecraft.

Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field strength in this area has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years just as the area itself has grown and moved westward. And over the past five years a second centre of minimum intensity has developed southwest of Africa, very near to where the Willowy was sailing.

One speculation regarding this weakening is that it is a sign that the Earth is heading for a pole reversal – in which the north and south magnetic poles flip.

This flip won’t happen immediately but instead would occur over the course of a couple of centuries during which there would be multiple north and south magnetic poles all around the globe.

The impact would be enormous for seafaring vessels whose navigation was based on magnetic compasses – causing them not only to sail in circles, but perhaps not even realise it.

Fortunately, as the crew and the company’s onshore marine superintendents knew, it has been decades since magnetic compasses governed maritime navigation.

Modern ships like the Willowy use something called a gyrocompass instead, which finds true north as determined by gravity and the axis of the Earth’s rotation rather than magnetic north.

Now, this is where it gets very interesting, especially if you’ve been following some discussions in physics for the past few decades where it has been suggested that there is a link – mysterious and unknown – between gravity and magnetism. And it’s also where the article begins to raise more questions than it answers, for we’re informed that the Willowy’s gyrocompass mysteriously malfunctioned, cause unknown:

The crew, alongside the company’s shore-based marine superintendents, investigated and identified that the ship’s primary gyrocompass was indeed malfunctioning.

The ship resumed its course safely when it switched to using the secondary gyrocompass, along with an old-fashioned magnetic compass for good measure, Executive Ship confirmed to Sky News.

Asked what caused the failure, the company described it as “an incidental breakdown” and added “repair will be done at the next port where the cause will be identified by shore technicians”.

But wait a minute, what about those four other ships involved in the incident? Indeed, the article itself asks this question in the very next paragraph:

But what about the other ships in the Willowy’s vicinity, circling and seeming as if they would converge?

A spokesperson for Executive Ship explained to Sky News: “The initial presumptive cause of circling for the Willowy was considered to be strong currents which also led the crew to perceive that other ships were circling too.”

With so many mysteries on the oceans, it must be easy to panic at sea.

And with that rather lack-luster ending and non-explanation, the whole article ends.

As the reader might have guessed, this has my high octane speculations and suspicions running in all sorts of directions, all of them in “the red zone.” For example:

What if the appearance of the South Atlantic anomaly is not entirely natural? What if it is either deliberately engineered, or, is a consequence – an unknown effect – of so many new technologies being introduced around fifty years ago, such as extremely low frequency radio broadcasting using deeply embedded antennae in the Earth, which might interfere with the planetary dynamo and hence with the magnetic field? What if such technologies and there effects were deliberately investigated in the past 50 years, such that utilizing that technology one could literally induce a pole shift, or the creation of several local north or south magnetic poles?

But as the article notes, magnetic compasses and so on should not even be a concern, since ships use gyrocompasses. So the implication is that something might be causing gyrocompasses to malfunction simultaneously and in the same area. If that is the case (and the article does not explicitly say so, I’m merely speculating that it might be), then the question is what is making that happen? Given that the article spends much time indicating that many incidents might be written off to electronic warfare and interference of some sort, I wonder if it is being suggested that interference along the lines of my speculations in the previous paragraph isn’t being suggested. But how and why?

My suspicion is that somehow the gyrocompasses are being interfered with. There might be a variety of methods to do this: introduction of subtle precessional “wobbles” in the compass, which could “move” rotational “north” to a different position. Since gyrocompasses are based on the mass and rotation of the Earth and the compass in relation to them, this would seem to imply an ability to alter local or regional conditions; think of the “masscons” beneath the Moon’s surface, anomalous concentrations of mass, which would increase the local gravitational acceleration on the lunar surface. Similar things might be being engineered – deliberately, or as an unintended consequence of other systems engineering.

In any case, I don’t know about you, but I have the suspicion, the intuition, that regardless of whether or not we’re looking at deliberate intentional (or unintentional) interference, the bottom line is we’re looking at interference of major navigation systems.

And that makes this story one to watch.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/06/why-are-ships-at-sea-going-in-circles/

On the Magnetic Field

ESA’s SWARM investigates weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, possible split up of South Atlantic Anomaly

ESA's SWARM investigates weakening of Earth's magnetic field, possible split up of South Atlantic Anomaly

Over the past 200 years, Earth’s magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength. Meanwhile, a large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America — known as South Atlantic Anomaly. Over the past 5 years, however, a second center of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa, suggesting that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.

Earth’s magnetic field is vital to life on our planet– it is a complex and dynamic force that protects living beings from cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun.

The current prevailing understanding is that it’s largely generated by a sea of superheated, swirling liquid iron that makes up Earth’s outer core around 3 000 km (1 864 miles) below the surface. It acts as a spinning conductor, producing electrical currents that generate the continuously changing electromagnetic field.

It’s known that the field varies in strength and direction. For instance, recent studies have shown that the north magnetic pole’s position is rapidly migrating toward Siberia.

Image credit: World Data Center for Geomagnetism/Kyoto University

Image credit: World Data Center for Geomagnetism/Kyoto University

For the past 200 years, the magnetic field has lost about 9 percent of its strength on a worldwide average.

Meanwhile, a large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America — known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

The South Atlantic Anomaly refers to an area where our protective shield is weak. This animation shows the magnetic field strength at Earth’s surface from 2014-2020 based on data collected by the Swarm satellite constellation. Credit: ESA

The minimum field strength in this area has pummeled from 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000 from 1970 to 2020. At the same time, the area of the anomaly has expanded and advanced westward at a pace of around 20 km (12 miles) per year.

In addition, for the past five years, a second center of minimum intensify has appeared southwest of Africa, indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could rupture into two separate cells.

The magnetic field is commonly pictured as a powerful dipolar bar magnet at the planet’s core, tilted at about 11° to the axis of rotation. However, the growth of the anomaly signifies that the process involved in generating the field is more complex as simple dipolar models were not capable of accounting for the latest development of the second minimum.

The South Atlantic Anomaly refers to an area where our protective shield is weak. White dots on the map indicate individual events when Swarm instruments registered the impact of radiation from April 2014 to August 2019. The background is the magnetic field strength at the satellite altitude of 450 km (280 miles). Credit: ESA

Scientists from the Swarm Data, Innovation, and Science Cluster (DISC) used information from ESA’s Swarm satellite constellation to study the anomaly and have a better understanding of it. Swarm satellites are built to determine and accurately measure the different magnetic signals comprising the Earth’s magnetic field.

“The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously,” said Jurgen Matzka from the German Research Center for Geosciences.

“We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth’s core driving these changes.”

earth-magnetic-field-may-20-2020-2

Image credit: ESA/ATG Medialab

Scientists have been speculating whether the present weakening of the field is an indication that the planet is heading for an imminent pole reversal, in which the north and south magnetic poles reverse places.

Such events have happened many times throughout the Earth’s history, and we are long overdue by the average rate — roughly every 250 000 years at which the switch occurs.

While the mysterious origin of South Atlantic Anomaly is yet to be identified, ESA said that at the surface level it does not present a cause for alarm. However, satellites and other spacecraft flying through the area are more likely to experience technical malfunctions as the magnetic field is weaker in this region, so charged particles can penetrate the altitudes of low-Earth orbit satellites. In addition, SWARM scientists think the intensity dip in the South Atlantic occurring now is well within what is considered normal levels of fluctuations.

Featured image credit: ESA/ATG Medialab

from:    https://watchers.news/2020/05/20/swarm-weakening-earth-magnetic-field-split-up-south-atlantic-anomaly/

The South Atlantic Anomaly

Has The Magnetic Pole Reversal Already Begun? South Atlantic Anomaly Could be First Evidence – Part I
2005 10 10

By Mitch Battros | ECTV Newsletter


(The Van Allen Belts) Image source: click here

In my last two interviews, one with Dr. Peter Olson, Geophysicist from Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Nicola Scafetta, Applied Physicist from Duke University has sparked my curiosity to apply an additional direction to my published “Equation”.

Still, the Sun is no doubt the origin of all interactive play. (at least in our solar system, but this will be explained in my book “Cosmic Rain” due out late spring.). The Sun is the triggering mechanism for a causal chain reaction to what happens on our home planet. One might say for all planets…in our solar system. What I have been learning lately is what slower acting, but perhaps far more powerful effect the Sun has on the Earth’s core. What we all agree upon (myself and my distinguished guest Dr. Olson and Dr. Scafetta) is the Sun is the primary cause for our climate and weather. It is pronounced and almost instantly in active effects. But what is going on below is far more powerful but disguises in a stealthy slow moving mannerism. The old story of the frog in the slowly heating pot comes to mind.

Although most of our scientific equipment is pointed towards the sky (satellites, telescopes etc,) to measure the Sun’s activity and its effect on our magnetic field, ionosphere, stratosphere, and as of late our “weather” (see equation), not much has been disclosed or known about what lies beneath our feet. So lets take a closer look.

Equation: 
Sunspots => Solar Flares => Magnetic Field Shift => Shifting Ocean and Jet Stream Currents => Extreme Weather and Human Disruption

In very much the same way as lightning strikes, so does the Earth’s highly charged core. Did you know when we think we see a lightning bolt hitting Earth; it is actually met with a matching bolt from the ground shooting upward? That’s’ right. A lightning bolt rises from the ground and meets a lightning bolt from the sky up to several hundred feet in the air. With this understanding, and upon Dr. Olson’s studies of the Earth’s core, mantle and crust, I am suggesting the solar flares, CME’s, and various space emitted charged particles, having a similar “reverse charge” in the same manner as lightning bolts. More on this later, but first let’s take a look at what is the “South Atlantic Anomaly”.

South Atlantic Anomaly
Earth is surrounded by a close-to-spherical magnetic field, the magnetosphere. According to what we know today, it is being generated by dynamo action in the Earth’s interior where conducting liquid metals are kept in motion by the forces of convection (heat exchange), coriolis, and gravitation, and just as the charged windings in the coil of a dynamo generate a magnetic field when moved, these masses create the Earth’s magnetic field. Without it, our compasses wouldn’t work, there would be no northern lights (auroras), and it protects us from space radiation by deflecting high energy particles from deep space or by capturing them in the so-called Van Allen Belts. Of these, discovered by the first US satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, there are two, one closer, the other farther away, and both surround the Earth like a doughnut.

Unfortunately, at a certain location over the South Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Brazil, the shielding effect of the magnetosphere is not quite spherical but shows an unusual distortion, which scientists explain as a result of the eccentric displacement of the center of the magnetic field from the geographical center of the Earth (by 280 miles) as well as the displacement between the magnetic and geographic poles of Earth. This is to say Magnetic North is not consistent with Geographical North. At times this area becomes very unstable and “bounces” kilometers apart. But there is more to this “unpredictable” monolithic anomaly than many in the science community had ever known…until now.

Article from: ECTV Newsletter

from:    http://www.redicecreations.com/news/2005/10oct/poleshift1.html