All the essential food nutrients in balance are needed by the brain for positive behavioral performance and ability to handle stress.
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Of the many amazing cases Schauss has worked with, here are several examples:
• Eskimos and Native Americans living in very remote territories on indigenous food supplies in the Stewart Islands of Alaska, who had been physically and psychologically healthy for centuries, experience the degenerative diseases and moral decay so prevalent in western culture when the foods (not specified) from that culture are allowed in. Crimes are subsequently committed for which these “primitive” cultures didn’t even have words in their language to describe; the words had to be invented.
• In Germany, an extremely hyperactive child would react violently, to the point of throwing siblings out of closed windows, within 3 to 5 minutes of receiving small but brain-imbalancing amounts of phosphate additives from processed foods. His parents, and many others experiencing similar problems, noted dramatic behavioral improvements when the diets were better balanced. (A double-blind study of children reported in Science, 3/20/80, further proved the dietary links to “hyperactivity” first warned of by Dr. Benjamin Feingold.)
• After Schauss spoke for over three hours on the importance of good nutrition to a group of prisoners, these men decided to try to obtain some nutritional supplements to their prison food. After fighting hard for two years to make these available, even petitioning the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, these inmates had all their requests denied and were transferred throughout the prison system. This resulted in the transferred men inspiring many other prisoners to seek better nutrition, and finally the facility in Lompoc, California, allowed inmates to choose three supplements which they could purchase with their prison wages. They chose brewer’s yeast, wheat germ and desiccated liver. One of the men wrote back to Schauss and said, in part: I noticed that supplements motivate a feeling of health and hope in me, also in others around me, many of whom have shown little or no sign of hope before. In fact I saw guys smile today—and this was only a week after they got the supplements—that I had never seen smile before and that is ten years.
That is really encouraging.
The Forest Die-Out Continues
The almost unbelievable rate at which the Earth’s remaining forest cover is being destroyed by human exploitation (20 to 30 million hectares per year —Global 2000 Report; 50 acres per minute—Myers, The Sinking Ark), are finally being widely acknowledged, and their additional consumption by wildfire is, we have seen, increasingly been made evident.
What has, of course, not been widely recognized or acknowledged is the recent evidence disclosing the cyclical nature and accurate timing of the glacial-interglacial-glacial sequence; nor has the last 10,000 years of soil demineralization and retrogressive vegetational succession been brought to present focus within the multitude of human plans, schemes and struggles for prosperity and survival.
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If these realities had been clear, perhaps the many environmental modification projects to date would have had their basis in a wholly different appreciation of natural systems: the beauty of their design, the inherent provisions for human prosperity within the natural design, and the requirements of natural systems to maintain a perpetual symbiotic relationship with mankind.
Consider again all the factors of forest assault in their simultaneous operation: human deforestation, soil degeneration, insects/diseases, fire, worsening climate, air pollution, acid rains. . . Then consider John Hamaker’s estimation that human actions have accelerated the glacial onset by 500 years, and the “20-year transition period” by some unknown amount.
A discussion of forest die-out would by no means be complete without looking at a picture of how another “team” is moving quickly to help annihilate the forests: insects and disease, of course. This important section has also been placed in the back of my separate volume. For a more in-depth look at the forest predators aside from man, and their crucial relationship to soil fertility, plus a look at the so-called “acid from heaven” crisis, see Appendix III of To Love And Regenerate The Earth at this website.
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Chapter 6
The Glacial Process and
the End of the Food Supply
6
Introduction
John Hamaker completed this article in May 1981, and it is likely one of the most important articles that can be found in terms of understanding how our living Earth works, and consequently how a living humanity can and must work en rapport with this established planetary Biosphere. This paramount need is again made self-evident herein, because, as Hamaker describes it, “The climate cycle is a byproduct of the entire life system, all of which rests on the expenditure of atomic energy in the tectonic system.”
This forms the central underlying theme of “The Glacial Process and the End of the Food Supply.” Once again the overlying theme is the fact of human responsibility to uplift and restore that entire life system, and John Hamaker makes the urgency of this great task crystal clear, “We have no time to spare in gaining control of the glacial process—it has already started.”
Hamaker appropriately concludes the article with a list of minimal objectives to be met if such a worldwide effort to stabilize and replenish the Earth’s biosphere is to succeed.
Following the article is a look at how such documents as the U.S. Government’s Global 2000
Report and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Strategy relate, or do not relate, to the principles and themes of this book’s first six chapters.
May the reader proceed with understanding.
It is one of the moral functions of science to change this attitude of men to the soil which has borne them; to bring men to a clear recognition of the marvel and beauty of the mechanism on which the existence of all the living beings on the earth intimately depends. This end it attains through the clear views which it opens into the structure and history of the earth by removing the dull conception of mere chance which we almost instinctively apply to the phenomena of nature, and in its place giving an understanding of those processes which lead to the order and harmony of the universe.
—Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
The Origin and Nature of Soils, 1891
6
The Glacial Process and
the End of the Food Supply
The information about past glacial periods is now sufficient so that there is general agreement on what has happened in the past. There is no agreement on why it happened.
We can say with assurance that the climate cycle requires very close to 100,000 years to be completed. We can say that during that time there are only 10,000 years in which there is a temperate zone capable of supporting an agricultural and technological civilization. We are at the end of the 10,000 year period.
For the purpose of a discussion of the survival of civilization, the climate cycle consists of about 10,000 years of interglacial conditions and 90,000 years of glacial conditions. If we are to have any chance of survival, we must understand the glacial process so we can take the necessary steps to eliminate glaciation.
There are two energy systems which are so powerful by comparison to any other factors (such as sun spots, the Milankovitch effects, or the alignment of planets in space) that these latter factors can be dismissed except to note that whatever effect they have, it is superimposed on the glacial process without substantially altering it. Both of the primary energy systems use the energy in the atom. One is the sun and the other is the tectonic system.
The Sun
There is not much to say about this practically constant source of energy. The earth intercepts this supply of energy constantly. However, if the energy incident to the earth at the higher latitudes is deflected into space instead of being absorbed at ground level, the total amount of energy available to warm the earth is decreased by that amount. During the glacial period the total amount of sun energy reaching the earth is decreased because the CO (from the tectonic 2
system) directs a heavy cloud cover to the polar latitudes. The clouds have a very high albedo, i.e., ability to reflect the sun’s rays into space.
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The Tectonic System
Everything on this earth, especially the maintenance of a viable environment for all living organisms, is totally dependent on the tectonic system. When the tectonic system runs out of fuel and fails, the earth will be a cold dead planet like Mars. Although everything on and in the earth is connected to everything else, only those factors directly related to glaciation are pertinent to this discussion.
The tectonic system is a thermomechanical system. As such, it is designed to work in conformance with all the known laws governing such systems and in conformance with the known physical characteristics of the materials which comprise the system. The system is also capable of performing in a manner which produces the geological structures which have been found on the land and on the ocean floor. The principal operational elements of such a system are shown in Fig. 6.1 (page 132-133). For pictorial reasons, the sketch is not to scale.
Operational Components of
the Tectonic System
If the tectonic system is to work, certain requirements must be met. These will be described in detail later. The requirements are:
1. The crust must be supported by the hydraulic pressure beneath it.
2. The elevation of the crust at any point must depend on the weight of the crust and the pressure beneath it.
3. There must be a massive release of energy at some point in order to build sea floor at the center of the ocean, melt it down, and send it back. The only such energy supply available is atomic. Heat is also needed to maintain the internal heat requirements of the earth.
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4. The energy source must be at the edge of the continents where sufficient pressure is demonstrated to build mountains and hydraulically lift sections of the sea floor to plateau elevations. The energy is released in what I call continental heaters.
5. The principal source of radioactive fuel is the unmelted portion of the mantle.
Everything which has been melted was melted at the expense of its original supply of radioactive materials.
6. The highest temperatures are in the heaters, where gravity separation of the molten components results in accumulation of a critical mass which, in turn, results in release of energy by explosion.
The next highest temperature is in the core, which, according to seismic data, is melted to within 800 miles of the center of the earth in spite of the great pressure at that depth. The core gets its heat from the hot magma discharged from the heaters.
The third highest temperature is in the mantle, which gets its heat primarily from contact with the core as the heat from the core moves across the temperature gradient to the cold of outer space.
The fourth highest temperature is in the Mohorovich discontinuity (“gunk”).
7. The pressure at a common elevation under the crust is highest in the heater. At all other points there is a lower pressure caused by the friction of flow of superheated magma out of the heater to the common reservoir (the core) and back up to the crust.
8. The contour of the mantle is a true circle at 90 degrees to the earth’s axis. The shear line or line of relative motion between the crust and the mantle is a true circle and lies just above the mantle.
9. There are basically three types of rocks produced in the tectonic system. The effect of gravity separation in the heater is shown in the igneous rocks, which show up as intrusions and extrusions in the mountains and hills above it.
The lighter-weight materials expelled from the heater to the core float on top of the core, and the heavier components sink into the core material. The lightweight materials are low in melting point and super-heated and hence more fluid than the core material. They would therefore tend to cut channels through the core material to points of more or less regular usage such as the mid-ocean ridge. The material which arrives at the ridge holds the pressure against the gunk and feeds material into the gunk as required to make up for that which is melted down in the heater.
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Fig. 6.1 Hamaker’s Tectonic System Diagram
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The gunk gets that name for lack of a better one. It has peculiar properties. It is thought that there is several times as much gunk as ocean floor. If so it must move into the heater at a fraction of the velocity of the crust. As the gunk travels, it must tear and erode particles of unmelted rock from the mantle. The gunk is therefore magma of the same type as that which comes out of a ridge, and is enriched with solid bits of mantle, which stiffen it like flour added to bread dough. It carries all the elements, including unused radioactive compounds, into the heater where the lighter materials are separated out and moved up to the crust, the radioactive materials are used in the heater, and the heavier materials are dropped out in the core.
The gunk can support heater action wherever used material can be expelled from the heater and gunk or mantle is supplied as the make-up material. The action will not occur if there is enough motion in the gunk to prevent gravity separation.
Description of Components
The mantle
The mantle is the original space debris which formed the earth. It has low-melting-point aluminum silicate above and below it in the molten form. Therefore, the low-melting-point compounds in the mantle must be melted. The higher-melting-point compounds must exist as a porous sintered mass in order to give seismic reflections in at least some respect similar to those from a solid mass. Since the molten compounds exist throughout the mantle, a positive pressure in a heater can initiate a flow in a downward direction. The flow from the heater is very hot and it can erode and melt a channel through the mantle as the heater builds up strength. The heaters have operated all over the mantle. By this time there must be numerous old channels, such as point A, Fig. 6.1, that are no doubt partially blocked but operable as needed, to conduct a flow of magma to any part of the crust that needs it.
The Ocean Floor
The floor is built by something which I call a ridge toggle because it functions much like a toggle press. The toggle is fifty to several hundred miles wide, as measured along the ridge, and it extends several hundred miles at 90 degrees to the ridge.
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Probably no more than fifty miles either side of the ridge is involved in the production of the force which pushes the sea floor toward the land and into the continental heaters.
When there is increased flow at E, Fig. 6.1, both sides of the toggle lift up until the magma can leak through and fill the crack (Fig. 6.2, page 136). As the magma escapes from the magma chamber, the toggle drops down. The ocean water and the walls of the rift freeze the magma to some depth. Below that it varies from plastic to molten at the bottom. Since new magma has entered the rift, the two opposing halves of the toggle must move farther apart. The force generated by two members operating at an angle approaching 180 degrees is so great that the ocean floor must move or the material in the rift must fail. The amount of force exerted is testified to by the fact that only a few hundred yards below the surface, the magnetic orientation lines in the rock become completely jumbled together, showing that the pressure forges the hot, somewhat plastic, rock into a cohesive mass.
There is a similar force exerted in the lower portion of the rift when the bottom edges tend to come together as the plate rises. It is doubtful, however, that much pressure is exerted on the ocean floor because the more plastic magma in the lower portion will yield too easily.
The act of yielding, however, may force material upward and cut channels through which the magma can enter as it opens above. Such a crack is shown in Fig. 6.4, p. 137. It is much wider than most such fissures because at the latitude of Iceland the toggle is working against great pressure, there being no heaters to receive the sea floor. The toggle is therefore on the high side of the approximately 3-to-6 mile thickness range of ridge toggles. The ocean floor thickens by cooling on the bottom side with time. A six-mile thick toggle does not have to rise very much to open a 200-foot wide fissure.
Numerous cracks have been detected parallel to the rift and extending for some distance away from the rift. It seems probable that these are caused by bending. The magma chamber is not very wide, and pressure and volume changes in the rest of the system are reflected immediately in the chamber. The toggle plates are too heavy and long to react quickly to such changes; therefore, one would expect the ends of the toggle plates to receive a cantilevered load at the rift. If the pressure and volume in the chamber increase, the bottom of the plates is put in tension. The top of the plates is in compression. When the chamber pressure and volume decrease, the top of the plates is in tension and the bottom in compression. Since the top is cold, and cold rock has almost no tensile strength, the tension cracks occur on the top side.
Thus there is probably a bending action in the toggles adjacent to the rift in addition to the up-and-down movements of Fig. 6.2, which open and close the rift. The force required to keep the ocean floor under pressure and feeding into the heaters (Fh, Fig. 6.2) is developed in the same manner as the force in a toggle press. The toggle can not buckle because it is uniformly supported by the weight of water and plate on the top side and the hydraulic pressure of the magma on the bottom side.
Up
Down
Fv
Fh
Simplified
force diagram
Fig. 6.2 Ridge toggle action
10,000 YBP
Glacial advance and retreat,
100,000 YBP
1980
approximately 20,000 years
10,000 years inter-glacial
90,000 years glacial (no temperate zone)
Fig. 6.3 Buttes are formed on the ocean floor in response to pressure and volume changes in the magma of the tectonic system.
Fig. 6.4 Tension rift in the spreading crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, as exposed in southwest Iceland. The faults and fissures break a plain of Basalt lava flows that are a few thousand years old. The foreground fissure has a maximum width of about 60 meters (200 feet) and a maximum depth of about 45 meters (150 feet) below the rim on the near side and twice that below the rim on the far side. View is northeastward along the Almannagia (Great Fissure). Photograph by Bruce Heezen, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University. *See text for explanation.
Butte Formation and Glaciation
The record of pressure and volume of flow at the ridge during the climate cycle is clearly recorded in the butte formed at the ridge. The buttes are visible in Nevada, California, and on the ocean floor. One is formed on either side of the rift every 100,000 years.
The butte shown in Fig. 6.3 was proportioned on the basis of those in Nevada which were estimated to originally be 20 miles long by 2 miles high. The number of glacial advances and retreats during the last glaciation is an estimate based on some agreement among those who have studied the glacial deposits in depth. An accurate count could be made on the ocean floor.The two primary users of the magma are the ocean ridges and the inland sea floors being pumped up to plateau status. However, if the weight of the land mass increases by the addition of an ice field, the more fluid portion of the gunk will be squeezed out from under the depressed portion of the continent and into the inner core. The only place it can go from the inner core is out the ridges. Thus during glaciation, as one ice field after another is established, the flow at the ridge increases. As the flow at the ridge increases, the rate of ocean floor movement into the heater increases, and the heaters produce more melt and more pressure. When the glaciation collapses, the situation is reversed. There is a huge demand for magma under the formerly glaciated parts of the land mass, and the pressure and volume available at the ridges decreases accordingly. Over a period of a thousand years, more or less, the material in the center of the ridge collapses, leaving the two buttes facing each other. The material under the dashed lines (Fig. 6.3) feeds back into the rift to keep the ocean floor feeding into the heaters until the situation stabilizes.
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“Flow” of the Ocean Floor
The only large stress possible in the ocean floor is compression. The tensile strength of cold rock is only about 4 percent of compressive strength, and shear strength is between 10
percent and 20 percent of compressive strength. The compressive stress for the floor thickness is probably no more than 10,000 psi. The shear stress is probably no more than 1,000 psi. When a toggle is ready to move, it must shear the fracture zone on each side of the toggle. Since the toggles are from fifty to several hundred miles wide along the rift, a force of 100 psi acting on an effective one-mile thickness in the rift would be much more than enough to initiate shear in the fracture zone. The shear crack originates at the toggle and runs as far along the fracture zones as it can before elasticity in the rock absorbs the motion of the toggle. So the toggle has to go through a number of cycles to crack the fracture zones all the way to the shore. Toggles move independently and they will move in the direction that offers the least resistance.
But they do not go very far before they meet too much resistance and have to wait for adjacent toggles to move and help take up the strain in the ocean floor. For this reason they all stay close to the average ridge line (Fig. 6.5, p. 140). When the stress in the ocean floor is enough to overcome the frictional resistance of driving the ocean floor into the heaters, there is a general feeding into all of the heaters impelled by the elastic stress built up in the sea floor.
A direct shearing stress, such as that in the fracture zones, induces an equal shear stress at 90 degrees. Therefore, the toggle would just as soon shear across its width as down the fracture zones. It will readily do so in response to a higher pressure from one side of the toggle than the other side. The gunk is always ready to heal the fracture zones. It is heavier than ocean floor, so it stops rising about a mile below the sea bottom. Major fracture zones make huge canyons. The ocean floor is not a single plate but a mosaic of a great many pieces always subject to change and motion (Fig. 6.5).
The floor thickens by freezing on the bottom side and adding sedimentary deposits on the top side as it moves away from the ridge. The total thickness of the ocean floor at the edge of the continent might be 15 or 20 miles. Largely due to the weight of sedimentary deposits, the ocean floor sinks lower as it moves and the deep ocean basins are thus formed.
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Fig. 6.5 Eight toggles in the South Atlantic mid-ocean ridge P . 1 4 1
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The rate at which the ocean floor travels varies widely. The variation which is probably common to all sea floors is that they move faster during glaciation than during the interglacial period. The Nevada buttes (Fig. 6.3) tell us that the floor traveled 20 miles in 100,000 years or 12.6 inches per year, which is well above the 2 inches to 4 inches per year that it has been moving in recent years. Part of that speed of movement is due to the fact that the mid-ocean ridge, which built the Great Basin plateau, was close to shore. The ridge itself may have been moving eastward because there was too much resistance to movement on the west side of the ridge. The basin was built so fast and raised out of the water so quickly that the ridges did not have time to be covered with much sedimentary rock. Ocean floor studies of buttes could probably give us a more accurate idea of the increase in speed of floor formation during glaciation relative to the interglacial rate.
In recent centuries ocean floor feeding into the heaters has occurred on about a 100-year cycle. Following a series of heavy earthquakes around the Pacific “ring of fire” which herald the feeding, we have had 50 years of colder-than-average weather. The cold weather is accompanied by more volcanic action and the warm weather by less.
During the hundred-year period, ocean water penetrates deep into the joint between the incoming ocean floor and the mountain above it. It comes back out as superheated steam which cuts the sedimentary rock away. The deep trenches in front of the heaters are formed in this way. The mineralized hot water rises to the surface, causing the upwelling currents so widely observed. The minerals support an abundant sea life and excellent fish yields. But when the ocean floor moves into the heater, all the leaks are sealed and the fishermen must go elsewhere. When the ocean floor feeds, a large amount of heat and liquefied gases, mostly carbon and sulfur oxides, are released. The ocean warms up a degree or two, and the gases either dissolve into the water or go up into the atmosphere.
Ocean floor volcanoes form in large numbers at the ridges. The flexing of the toggles causes many leaks, particularly in the fracture zones between adjacent toggles where the rock is subject to both horizontal and vertical shearing forces. These volcanoes evidently result from the fact that there is highly fluid magma at the ridges which, during times when the pressure in the magma chamber is high, is able to blow out. One would expect an accumulation of gases at the ridge peak also, and the two together are probably all that is involved in these volcanoes. As they leave the ridge, they invariably freeze up and are covered with sediment.
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There is another type of ocean volcano. Hawaii is the outstanding example. It is standing still while the ocean floor is moving past it to the northwest. When one volcano moves away from it, another forms behind the first. That would only be possible if there were a heater operating in the mantle. How it got started is anybody’s guess. Once started there is little likelihood that it will stop until it becomes a part of the continental heater system. As fast as the radioactive material is used up in a batch, the gunk cascad