The Earth's Magnetic Field is Young!

Ever since creation and the fall of man and the universe things are running down to an eventual heat death where organized energy has dissipated itself. The sun, the stars, are going to burn themselves out if no intervention takes place. Now, the point is that some of these processes could only have been so strong at the beginning and even with modest decay rates signal a young creation and universe. Such is the science to date on the earth's magnetic field. It is presently declining in strength and extrapolating back into time taking into account some fluctuating anomalies the earth's magnetic field could only have been wound up a few thousand of years ago not millions and billions as the religious philosophy of evolution would like you to believe. I've included 3 articles here as they show the development of the creation model's understanding of the earth's magnetic field. We are indebted to Dr Thomas Barnes and Dr Russell Humphreys as they have developed this model to our current understanding, and have answered their critics who have proposed an eternal dynamo theory for the earth's magnetic field for what seems like the sole purpose being to prop up their worldview rather than common sense science.

Article 1 of 3

by Thomas G. Barnes, D.Sc.

There is nothing more devastating to the doctrine of evolution than the scientific evidence of a young earth age. That evidence is provided by the rapid depletion of the energy in the earth's main magnet, its electromagnetic dipole magnet in the conductive core of the earth. Its electric current is using up the magnet's energy. The rate of energy consumption is now known. From that information and a reasonable limit on the maximum plausible initial energy one can show that the earth's magnetic age is limited to thousands of years, not the billions claimed by evolutionary scientists.

A search of the technical literature in 1970 provided two important clues to this explanation of the earth's dipole magnet:

1. In 1883 Sir Horace Lamb solved the complex electromagnetic problem of a free current circulating in a conducting sphere.1

2. Evaluations have been made on the strength and direction of this dipole magnet in the core of the earth ever since the first historic evaluation was made by Gauss in the 1835 epoch. 2,3

The first clue predicted decay, the second clue confirmed it. Rarely in physics has there been a better illustration of a mathematical physics theory and such extensive observational data to confirm it.

The author's articles and book, that developed and applied this theory of a freely decaying magnet to an earth-age limitation, were ignored by doctrinaire evolutionists for years. They apparently felt that the less said the better. In 1981, however, the American Civil Liberties Union decided to make an all-out attack upon it. The U.S. Geological Survey research geologist G. Brent Dalrymple has spearheaded the attack. In addition to his appearing as their expert witness in the courts, he has written a book and an article in the Journal of Geophysical Education4 attacking this author's publications on the theory of the earth's magnetic age limitation. This Impact article is a response to his geological education article.

As is true of most evolutionary geologists, Dalrymple hypothesizes a dynamo in the molten core of the earth. It is supposed to be the mechanism for generating the electric current required to power the dipole magnet for more than three billion years. Dalrymple states: "Barnes criticizes the dynamo theory because of the absence of a definitive solution. " He then goes into a lengthy discourse about dynamos. One may summarize his ultimate conclusion by his own statement: "Even though there is near universal agreement that a dynamo exists in the earth's core, the exact mechanism …is not known."

Not only are evolutionists in trouble by having nothing but faith to support their dynamo hypothesis, the same can be said for their lack of an applicable energy source to run the dynamo. One has but to review the literature to see that no one has come up with an acceptable energy source. Dalrymple uses the "scatter-gun" approach. "At present, scientists do not know which of the several sources actually drives the dynamo; in fact, it may be some combination of sources." Prior to that he stated: "At present it seems that gravitation may be the most plausible source of energy.... " That is nonsense and completely unsupported. There is as yet no concept as to how that type of energy would be able to run the mechanism, if there were such a thing.

The basic problem with the evolutionary geologists' education on the earth's magnetism may be expressed in the language of an engineer as his failure to distinguish between the signal and the noise. The two are not functionally related. The earth's dipole field is the signal. It is known to be due to electric current in the core of the earth, more than a thousand miles away from the earth's surface. The noise is the super-position of all other magnetic fields from whatever magnetic sources that may exist near enough to make any contribution to the net magnetic field at any point where the measurements are being made. There are literally billions of sources of magnetic noise and ordinarily their location and energy content are not known. For example, there are times when there are magnetic storms of such magnitude that transatlantic radio communication is totally disrupted.

As an illustration of Dalrymple's failure to make this distinction between signal and noise one should examine his statement: "Barnes' hypothesis also does not fit the facts. Freely decaying currents cannot explain the existence, configuration, movement, or changes of the nondipole field...." Dalrymple does not seem to understand that the nondipole field is noise, not the signal. The magnetic age of the earth is related to the signal, the dipole field, not to the noise. The dipole field is decaying in accordance with known theoretical physics equations. That is the signal which Gauss separated from noise when he made his historic evaluation.

Dalrymple quotes the following statement from Barnes: "As of now there is no physical evidence, seismic or otherwise, that there is any motion within the core." He rejects that and cites a westward motion of the nondipole field as evidence of motion in the core. His point is to justify the evolutionary claims of fluid motion in the core as the dynamo mechanism. That is irrelevant because as previously noted, there is no known dynamo mechanism. Nevertheless, it shows his failure to distinguish between signal and noise. The nondipole field is noise and no one knows the location of its source. Without knowing the location of the sources of the noise one cannot compute its total energy.

There has been a measured westward drift of the earth's magnetic dipole, a precession but not a nutation. Stanley Stanulonis has derived a theoretical physics explanation of this westward precession.5 It is due to the solar wind drag on the magnetic dipole field as the earth rotates eastward. The net result is a shifting of the electrical currents in the core of the earth, not a motion of the molten mass in the core of the earth. Stanulonis' solution contains both the precession and decaying properties of the earth's magnetic dipole field. Those are properties of the signal, not the noise.

Dalrymple holds to the evolutionary arguments that paleomagnetic evidences show that the earth's magnetic field is more than three billion years old and has gone through many reversals, changing its polarity from north to south and back many times, at irregular intervals. Those and the other arguments of Dalrymple are answered in detail in the new revised and expanded edition of Barnes' Origin and Destiny of the Earth's Magnetic Field, Technical Monograph No. 4, published by the Institute for Creation Research (132 pp.).

One cannot make a credible evaluation of the earth's magnetic dipole moment from such paleomagnetic data. They are useful for geophysical exploration, where anomalies indicate deviations from the dipole field, but not for evaluating the dipole field. That is illustrated by the graph shown. It compares the paleomagnetic data with the unquestioned real-time magnetic dipole moment data. The top curve is from the earth's magnetic moment data. It shows the known decay. The bottom jagged curve is derived from a Russian scientist's paper (S.P. Buriatskaya, 1967), which used all of the paleomagnetic data. Note that there is not the slightest trace of the known decay in the curve of these paleomagnetic data. One can classify the paleomagnetic data as noise and the real-time data as the signal.

Year of Measurement

The Barnes' theory of a young magnetic age for the earth, only a few thousand years, is the only theory of the source of the earth's dipole magnet that is supported by the following important facts:

1. A rigorous mathematical physics solution.

2. A history of real-time evaluations of the state of the magnet (its magnetic moment).

3. A clearly identified source of energy (its own magnetic field energy).

4. A definitive predictive value.

5. A means of computing its source energy and subjecting that value to an independent check that would have falsified the theory had there not been a check.

On the other hand, the presumed dynamo theory has no substantive theoretical basis and no definitive predictive value. Its presumed reversal mechanism has admittedly remained inscrutable. The presumed supporting paleomagnetic data contributes to the noise, not the signal. It does not even check with the decay of the earth's dipole field during the time in which that is accurately known, ever since Gauss' evaluations.

The game is up for the evolutionist if he acknowledges that the earth is only a few thousand years old. To avoid being completely wiped out he knows that he must fight with all his might, fair or foul, against this scientific theory and supporting evidence of a young magnetic earth-age. It is no wonder that Dalrymple, his ACLU sponsor, and the nine additional noted evolutionists whom he acknowledges gave him review support on his article, have made such a desperate effort to conceal this Achilles heel of evolution, the scientific evidence of a very young earth.

References

1. Sir Horace Lamb, Philosophical Transactions, (London) 174, pp. 519-549.
2. Sidney Chapman, The Earth's Magnetism. Methuen and Co., Ltd., London; John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, p. 23.
3. Keith L. McDonald and Robert H. Gunst. "An analysis of the earth's magnetic field from 1835 to 1965," ESSA Technical Report. IER 46-IES 1. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., p. 15.
4. Brent G. Dalrymple, "Can the earth be dated from decay of its magnetic field?", Journal of Geological Education, Vol. 31, No. 2, March 1983, pp. 124-132.
5. Stanley Stanulonis, "The Mechanism Responsible for the Precession of the Geomagnetic Dipole with Evaluation of the Earth's Core's Charge Density and Its Implication," Master of Science Thesis, University of Texas at El Paso, Physics Department, May 1974.

Article 2 of 3

by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.

The earth's magnetic field has been a mystery to man ever since 13th-century philosophers first noticed lodestones (magnetic rocks) turning north.1 In 1600, A.D. William Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's physician, shed light on the mystery by showing that "the terrestrial globe itself is a great magnet."2 Today, scientists think the earth is an electromagnet; the source of the magnetic field is probably a large electric current—billions of amperes—circulating in the earth's fluid core. But there is still a mystery today: How did the current get started, and what keeps it going? Scientists, who assume that the earth is old, conjecture that complicated flows of the fluid in the core somehow started the current and have maintained it for billions of years. However, such "dynamo" theories are complex, implausible, and incomplete. In the last two decades, they have run into serious problems from magnetic observations on earth3 and in the solar system.4

In 1971, Dr. Thomas Barnes, a creationist physicist, proposed that nothing keeps the current in the core going except its own inertia.5 His simple and rigorous "free-decay" theory would mean that the current is running down slowly, like a flywheel without a motor; thus the strength of the earth's magnetic field would be steadily decreasing over the centuries.6 Barnes cited some historical data7 (not well known at the time) showing that the overall strength of the earth's field has indeed steadily declined by about 7% since 1835, when it was first measured. The decay rate depends on the electrical resistance of the earth's core, and the observed rate is consistent with the estimated resistance of materials at core temperatures and pressures. 6,8 The field strength should decrease by a constant percentage each year, and the data are consistent with such a decrease, implying that the field loses half its strength every 1400 years. Such a rapid decay could not have continued for more than about 10,000 years; otherwise the initial strength of the field would have been impossibly high. Since the field probably started when the earth was formed, the present rapid decay of the field is strong evidence for a young earth.

Old-earth proponents, however, correctly point out that the earth's magnetic field has not always decayed smoothly.9-10 Archaeomagnetic (magnetism of pottery, bricks, etc.) data indicate that the present steady decay started around 500 A.D. For several millennia before that, the overall strength of the field had fluctuated up and down significantly. Paleomagnetic (magnetism of geologic strata) data provide persuasive evidence that the field reversed its direction scores of times while the fossil layers were being laid down.11 Since the field has changed so violently in the past, old-earthers ask, how do we know the present decrease in the field is a decay, not a fluctuation or a reversal? Furthermore, if a "dynamo" process did not start up the current in the core (as is becoming obvious by the problems with the theory), then how did the current originate?

This article summarizes five technical papers I have published to answer such questions. The discriminating reader will want to read them to understand more fully the model which is only summarized below.

Figure 1 shows what I think is the history of the earth's magnetic field. It can be divided into the following five episodes:

(1) Creation. In 1983, 1 pointed out that when God created the earth's original atoms He could have easily created the earth's magnetic field also, merely by bringing the atoms into existence with the spin axes of their nuclei all pointing in the same direction.12 Many atomic nuclei spin, and thereby generate tiny magnetic fields. There were so many spinning nuclei in the earth at creation that, if aligned, their fields would have added up to a large field of sufficient magnitude. As thermal collisions disoriented the nuclear spins, the laws of electricity predict a startup of an electric current within the core of the earth to sustain the field. The resulting initial field strength is consistent with the present geomagnetic data and a 6000-year age for the field. Thus we have a plausible explanation for how the current in the core got started.

In 1984, 1 extended my theory to the sun, moon, and planets,13 explaining the magnetic fields measured by the space probes of the last few decades, and predicting the approximate strength of the fields of Uranus and Neptune. In 1986, Voyager 2 verified the Uranus prediction,14 and we should find out about Neptune in early 1990.

(2) Pre-flood decay. After creation (and the Fall), the electric current in the earth's core would decay slowly, as would the field, for 1656 years, until the Genesis flood. During this period, the field would have been more than ten times stronger than it is today, thus shielding the earth from cosmic ray particles more effectively, reducing the production of carbon 14 in the pre-flood atmosphere, and making the earth a healthier place.5

(3) Rapid reversals during the flood. In 1986, I suggested that there was a powerful release of energy in the earth's core at the beginning of the Genesis flood, and that the resulting strong movements in the core field produced rapid reversals of the earth's magnetic field, about one per week, during the year that the flood was laying down the fossil layers at the earth's surface. General physical laws allow rapid reversals, a likely physical mechanism exists to cause the reversals, and observations of the sun's magnetic field demonstrate reversal cycles in nature today. This rapid-reversal model not only explains the general features of the paleomagnetic data, but also some specific features which have puzzled evolutionists.15

(4) Post-flood fluctuations. The disturbances in the core fluid during the flood would disrupt the electric current, chopping much of it up into small swirls oriented in different directions. Then the earth's field during and after the flood would not have the simple "dipole" (two poles, north and south) shape it has today. Instead, it would have a more complex shape, with strong "higher-order" components: quadrupole (four poles), octopole (eight poles), etc. Paleomagnetic data confirm the existence of such components in the field in the past. Standard electromagnetic theory predicts that, after the flood, the higher-order components would die away faster than the dipole part. Because the higher-order components can have either polarity, the strength of the field would fluctuate up and down, as different components died away at different rates.

Figure 2 shows world-averaged archaeomagnetic data.16 Since the dates conventionally assigned to the data points are based on radiocarbon dating, I have plotted the data on a time scale crudely corrected for changes in the percentage of carbon 14 in the atmosphere since the flood. The curve shown is a statistical fit using just the three simplest of dozens of possible components. The data need to be re-analyzed, allowing for a more complex field shape, but the curve fits the main features of the data, in particular, an initial rise and fall, the broad maximum at about the time of Christ, and the subsequent, steady decay.15

(5) Recent decay. Around 500 A.D., the last remaining higher-order component became small compared to the main dipole component, and the field decayed smoothly after that.

Though complex, this history of the earth's magnetic field agrees with Barnes' basic hypothesis, that the field has always freely decayed. I have merely made explicit two features which were always implicit in the free-decay theory: (a) that motions in the core fluid can disturb the field, and (b) higher-order modes of decay are possible. Both of these features have a firm basis in theory, experiment, and natural phenomena. In contrast to dynamo theories, the reversals and fluctuations I picture dissipated energy. The field has always been losing energy despite its variations, so it cannot be more than 10,000 years old. We now have simple explanations for the field's origin, history, and present state. In this light, the earth's magnetic field is no longer a mystery; it is a testimony of God's handiwork.

1. Peregrinus, Petrus. Epistola de Magnete (1279). Trans. by Silvanus P. Thompson, Epistle of Peter Periginus of Maricourt, to Sygerus of Foucaucourt, Soldier, Concerning Magnets (London: 1902).

2. Gilbert, William. De Magnete (1600). Trans. by P. Fleury Mottelay in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 28, R.M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).

3. Lanzerotti, L.J., et al. "Measurements of the large-scale direct-current earth potential and possible implications for the geomagnetic dynamo," Science 229 (5 July 1985, 47-49)

4. Parker, E.N. "Magnetic fields in the cosmos," Scientific American 249 (Aug. 1983) 44-54, see remarks on Mercury and Mars, p. 52. Hood, L.L. "The enigma of lunar magnetism," EOS 62 (21 April 1981) 161-163. Dirscoll, E. "That magnetic moon: How did it get that way?" Science News 101 (27 May 1972) 346-347.

5. Barnes, T.G. "Decay of the earth's magnetic moment and the geochronological implications," CRSQ 8 (June 1971) 24-29.

6."Electromagnetics of the Earth's field and evaluation of electric conductivity, current, and joule heating of the earth's core," CRSQ 9 (Mar. 1973) 222-230. Decay rate implies conductivity of 40,000 mho/m.

7. McDonald, K.L. and R.H. Gunst. "An analysis of the earth's magnetic field from 1835 to 1965," ESSA Technical Report IER 46-IES I (July 1967) U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Washington, D.C., Table 3, p. 14.

8. Stacey, F.D. "Electrical resistivity of the earth's core Earth and Planetary Science Letters 3 (1967) 204-206. Likely core materials imply conductivity of roughly 33,000 mho/m, agreeing with ref. 6.

9. Young, D.A. Christianity and the Age of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982) pp. 117-124.

10. Dalrymple, G.B. "Can the earth be dated from decay of its magnetic field?" Journal of Geological Education 31 (March 1983) 124-132.

11. Humphreys, D.R. "Has the earth's magnetic field ever flipped?" CRSQ 25 (Dec. 1988), in press.

12. "The creation of the earth's magnetic field," CRSQ 20 (Sept. 1983) 89-94.

13. "The creation of planetary magnetic fields," CRSQ 21 (Dec. 1984) 140-149.

14. "The magnetic field of Uranus," CRSQ 23 (Dec. 1986) 115.

15. "Reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the Genesis flood,' Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, Vol. 11 (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship, 362 Ashland Ave., 1986) 113-126.

16. Merrill R.T. and M.W. McElhinney, The Earth’s Magnetic Field (London Academic Press, 1983, 101-106)