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A new scientific paper attempts to explain a mystery at our planet's South Pole.
A team of investigators from the British Antarctic Survey
discovered a localized area where the Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting surprisingly quickly.
Using radar, they found that some of the ice in a 3 km thick layer appears to be missing.
They have proposed that the heat source causing the melting is
"unusually radioactive rocks"
combined with unusually hot water from deep underground.
Lead author Dr. Tom Jordan says of the investigation,
"Our results were quite unexpected,
as many people thought this region of Antarctica was made of ancient and cold rocks,
which had little impact on the ice sheet above.
We show that even in the ancient continental interior,
the underlying geology can have a significant impact on the ice.
But a clue to the actual cause of the anomalous ice melting might be found at the
"surprisingly hot poles of other planets in our solar system."
As we've pointed out in countless episodes,
physicist Wal Thornhill made the seemingly outrageous yet successful prediction
that the freezing cold North Pole of Saturn,
which had been deprived of sunlight for more than a decade,
would have a "hot spot" similar to the one at the planet's South Pole.
In 2007, a surprising warm spot was also found at the South Pole of Neptune.
The Electric Universe theory has always stated
that the Sun is primarily an electrical phenomenon
and electric currents flowing from the Sun to planets
has implications for many atmospheric phenomena
including the tremendous winds of gas giant planets
and also jet streams and weather patterns on Earth.
In recent years, professor Dr. Donald Scott has developed a model of the structure
of a type of electric current called a 'Birkeland current'
which can be identified visually by its unique counter rotation.
Critically, this counter rotation has been seen at the poles of Saturn,
Jupiter,
Neptune,
and in our own planet's Auroras.
Of course, the question is speculative
but we asked Dr. Scott if an incoming Birkeland current
could be the cause of the anomalous ice melting at the South Pole.
It's always interesting how relatively often new "surprising discoveries"
are being made that might be explained better by the Electric Universe ideas.
Much better than by accepted models of whatever it is being observed
and I'm just sort of amused by the way that classic standard scientists
will lurch and grab on to whatever is nearby
except they never think about looking up and say gosh, could it be electrical?
And so, using radar to look down through 3 km of ice, the British team found that
some of the ice covered an area that's twice the size of the City of London.
Now, this is a pretty big area, pretty big volume.
And that ice appeared to be missing, there's a big hole in there.
One explanation for the missing ice, their explanation,
was that there may be a radioactive rock deposit there that is supplying heat from below.
Now I guess it's certainly possible that there's a radioactive rock deposit below
where the ice has melted
but the Antarctic ice pack has been growing in recent years
while the Arctic ice pack has been shrinking.
So if there's any difference at all between the Arctic and the Antarctic
then it seems as though the Antarctic is getting colder and
that makes the melting of this ice even more anomalous, I guess.
So and the question is,
why is there a region deep down under the southern growing ice pack that's melting?
Well, after, if you think about it a minute, we know that the polar regions,
both north and south of the Earth,
are regions where Birkeland currents are coming in from the Sun
and they impinge down through the Earth's magnetosphere.
Several years ago, NASA said that the amount of current was unexpectedly high,
somewhere around 650,000 amperes.
Now, 650,000 amperes is a lot of, to put it in the vernacular, a lot of juice.
It's a lot of electric energy there.
Amperes is not energy but it can produce a great amount of heat.
OK, that's fine but why should that produce more melting at one pole than at the other?
The answer may lie in the fact that the northern Arctic polar region
is a layer of ice floating on top of a saltwater ocean.
And salt water is an excellent electrical conductor, that's my main point.
Ice is a good conductor and maybe it's not quite as good as salt water
but it's a pretty good conductor.
Well, the difference in the South, in the Antarctic,
is that the ice pack is sitting right down a smack on top of a continent of Earth,
Earth's material.
There is a continent down there, there's no Southern Ocean.
Instead of where the Arctic Ocean is, there's an Antarctic continent.
And the material that the Earth is made of
is generally not nearly as good an electrical conductor as salt water or ice.
So if you think about what's going on, if you consider the
path that maybe a Birkeland current might take as it comes in from the Sun,
comes down through the magnetosphere down vertically into the Earth.
And by the way, we've got some very nice video
of the counter-rotating currents in the Aurora Borealis that is certainly supporting evidence
that indeed that's what's happening so that Birkeland was quite right.
Anyway, if that current comes down through the snow and ice and then into Earth and rock.
Now in the North it flows through ice and saltwater.
Now each of these cases we can think of the electrical properties of those two layers
through which the current flows.
Well, the current flows through one resistor of,
if you think of those as layers as being resistances,
and the current and each of those resistors is the same,
the same amount of currents, the same amount of amperes.
The two resistors both have fairly low resistance values
when at the South Pole one of the resistors, the ice pack, has relatively low resistance.
But the earth and the rock is a very much higher resistance.
So just to get technical for a second,
when electrical current flows through two resistors connected in series,
energy is liberated in each resistor.
The expression is familiar to many people who had physics course.
Power equals I²R.
The I²R is the amount of electrical power that's released in the resistor R.
So the current is the same in both resistors
but the resistance of each of these resistances is different.
So the amount of heat, and this is the punchline,
the amount of heat produced in each of the two resistors
depends linearly on their resistance values.
So if the current, same current flows through,
one of the two resistors is the low resistance and one is a high resistance.
The low resistor will not get very warm but the high resistance one will.
And so, Birkeland currents have been passing down into the Earth for millennia.
So is that the cause of the hotspot?
Maybe, but the thing that makes me think that maybe it might indeed be correct,
is that there is the difference between what happens at the two poles
may well be explained by the difference between the electrical properties of the paths,
the two paths that the polar Birkeland currents have to take.
At least it seems like a more reasonable answer to me
than just postulating and groping around and say, oh my god,
what causes it must be a radioactive rock down there.