Breathing with the Earth
247
oned their calendar time primarily by the moon. These discoveries led
Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish natural philosopher and father of ion
chemistry, to suggest that this tidal magnetic rhythm was an innate
timekeeper regulating the few obvious biocycles then known.
Since then we've learned of many other cyclic changes in the energy
structure around us:
The earth's electromagnetic field is largely a result of interaction
between the magnetic field per se, emanating from the planet's
molten iron-nickel core, and the charged gas of the ionosphere. It
varies with the lunar day and month, and there's also a yearly
change as we revolve around the sun.
A cycle of several centuries is driven from somewhere in the galac-
tic center.
The earth's surface and the ionosphere form an electrodynamic res-
onating cavity that produces micropulsations in the magnetic field
at extremely low frequencies, from about 25 per second down to 1
every ten seconds. Most of the
micropulsation energy is concen-
trated at about 10 hertz (cycles per second).
Solar flares spew charged particles into the earth's field, causing
magnetic
storms.
The
particles
join
those
already
in
the
outer
reaches of the field (the Van Allen belts), which protect us by
absorbing these and other high-energy cosmic rays.
Every flash of lightning releases a burst of radio energy at kilocycle
frequencies, which travels parallel to the magnetic field's lines of
force and bounces back and forth between the north and south
poles many times before fading out.
The surface and ionosphere act as the charged plates of a condenser
(a charge storage device), producing an electrostatic field of hun-
dreds or thousands of volts per foot. This electric field continually
ionizes many of the molecules of the air's gases, and it, too, pulses
in the ELF (extremely low frequency) range.
There are also large direct currents continually flowing within the
ionosphere
and
as
telluric
(within-the-earth)
currents,
generating
their own subsidiary electromagnetic fields.
In the 1970s we learned that the sun's magnetic field is divided
from pole to pole into sectors, like the sections of an orange, and
the field in each sector is oriented in the direction opposite to
adjacent sectors. About every eight days the sun's rotation brings
a new region of the interplanetary (solar) magnetic field opposite
us, and the earth's field is slihgtly changed in response to the flip-