We
live in a time when it is almost impossible to get lost, even if
you want to. Except for some parts of Alaska, nearly every square
foot of the United States has been surveyed and mapped. Satellites
tell us where we are; computer databases tell us how to get where
we want to go. Some years ago, when a friend was leaving his job
to go wandering in Europe, my wife and I bought him a compass as
a symbolic gift. “Oh, uh, thanks,” he said when he saw
it. “Although you know, I’ve got GPS in my PDA.”
But a time is coming when neither the GPS nor the compass may be
much help for vagabonds—probably not within our lifetime,
but soon enough to cause science reporters to take notice. Scientists
have known for some decades that the Magnetic North Pole, toward
which our compass needles point, is not fixed in place, but is drifting
northwest across the Canadian Arctic. Every half million years or
so, the Earth’s magnetic field collapses into chaos and then
reassembles itself with reversed polarity. Today’s North Pole
would shift to the south and the South Pole northward. The last
time this happened was upwards of 780,000 years ago, so the geographers
who study these sorts of things have expressed the notion that we
might be “overdue” for a magnetic field collapse and
reversal. During the past decade, the pace of the Magnetic North
Pole’s shift has been increasing, and the strength of the
planet’s magnetic field has been deteriorating quickly enough
that it is beginning to look like an inversion may well be under
way. Within the next couple of millennia, all the compasses that
today point north may instead be pointing south.
This is the kind of science story—the kind usually associated
with asteroid “near misses”and human cloning—that
makes writers for the most staid newspapers reach for their Weekly
World News style manuals. To speak of the “collapse”
of the magnetic field is to conjure images of a planet laid bare
to the buffeting of lethal cosmic rays, satellites falling from
the sky, and even the bizarre concept of a “brain reboot,”
the latter predicated, no doubt, on the same sort of thinking that
induces people to go vacationing in Sedona, Arizona, to experience
the vibrations. While the New York Times didn’t mention
brain reboots in its July 13th article, “Will Compasses Point
South?”, it did reinforce the incorrect perception that a
“collapse” would mean that the magnetic field would
disappear for some decades-to-centuries before reconstituting itself.
In fact, only the poles would disappear (and reappear for a short
time in odd places, like Sedona), but the magnetic field itself,
which does indeed join the atmosphere in protecting us from lethal
cosmic rays, won’t go anywhere; it’ll just be having
something akin to an epileptic fit before reverting to its normal
bipolar behavior.
That’s not to say there won’t be some down sides. During
the collapse, some migratory animals that use the magnetic fields
may get confused and lost; electrical grids may get knocked out,
causing Americans to live the way people do in most of the non-Western
world; and satellites may cease to function with somewhat more frequency,
which could infuriate Sopranos fans everywhere. Compasses, of course,
will be pointing any which way. But on the plus side, we could have
auroras over Ann Arbor.
All in all, it seems the prospect of the collapse of the Earth’s
magnetic field ranks just a little higher than Iraq’s WMD
stockpile on the list of things to worry about in 2004. Still, even
in this satellite age of ours, there is something unsettling about
the notion of the inverted compass. Late in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick, when the Pequod is struck by lightning
and the ship’s compass reversed so that it seems to be sailing
east into the setting sun, the event is seen as an ill omen, as
if all of nature were trying to tell Ahab to change course and avert
his own destruction. In a novel laden with portents, the inverted
compass is among the most striking, perhaps because it seems so
profoundly wrong that a compass could point anywhere but north.
In these more informed and rational times, of course, we know events
such as compass inversions and collapses of the magnetic field have
nothing to do with mere human concerns. But just beneath the surface
lies our pre-conscious child’s fear of getting lost, and this
fear is what keeps us reading both compasses and omens. We put a
talismanic faith in the needle to keep us on the true path, and
when the needle starts spinning, when north becomes south and east
becomes west, when the world once again becomes a place where we
can be lost, that is when brains reboot and superstition takes over,
as it does for the crew of the Pequod. Of course, at the
end of Moby-Dick, after having sailed in direct contradiction
to the compass and everything else nature throws at it, the Pequod
sinks and Ahab is destroyed. An omen may not really be an omen,
but that doesn’t make it wrong. That may be something we want
to keep in mind in the coming years as our world slowly turns upside
down. A2P
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