Geologists would not believe his statement because they thought it would probably be millions or hundreds of millions of years between pole shifts, that this kind of change took a very long time. But because of Cayce’s prediction, certain scientists began to search anyway. A string of major pieces of evidence came forth that lent tremendous weight to what Cayce was saying, and they have now changed the world’s view on this subject. The scientists suspected that if there were a change in the physical poles, then there would also be a change in the magnetic poles. One of the ways they decided to study this possibility was to examine the ancient lava beds of the world. This started taking place, I believe, in the 1950s or early ’60s. They wanted to study lava beds because (1) they figured there would be tremendous volcanic action if such a shift took place, and (2) lava has a characteristic that could verify and date previous magnetic pole shifts.
Iron Pilings and Core Samples Iron pilings are found in most lava, and these pilings have a different melting point than the lava itself. The pilings harden while the lava is still flowing and, being iron, line up with the magnetic poles. Through this observation, geologists can see exactly where the magnetic poles were at the time the lava hardened. They needed to get samples from only three locations to be able to triangulate and know exactly where the magnetic north pole was at the time the pilings hardened. Then, of course, they could radiocarbon-date it, which was the best they could do back in those days. There were other approaches to this problem, which we will look at in a moment. So they discovered an earlier magnetic north pole that was not where it is now but a long way away, centered in Hawaii. That last shift took place right at the upper oval—a little less than 13,000 years ago. They then did ; another test and found that the poles had shifted before that at the lower oval. This opened up a whole new area of investigation into the Earth’s magnetics. The Geological Society of America published a summary of findings gathered from ocean-floor core samples (Geology 11:9, September 1983). The samples were six inches in diameter and eleven feet long, and the researchers analyzed the sediment. They discovered that sometimes the poles simply reverse themselves. The north becomes the south and the south becomes the north. This was another thing Edgar Cayce talked about that people had a hard time believing. But when they analyzed these core samples, they found it was true. Going back hundreds of millions of years, they discovered a cycle where the magnetic north pole would remain in place for a long time—then in a single day, less than 24 hours, magnetic north switched to the south. It stayed that way for a long time, then switched again. But toward the ends of these long cycles were shorter periods where the magnetic poles would reverse themselves again. This flip happened every once in a while. And as we come closer into present times, the flips are starting to happen closer together—from north to south, south to north, and at the same time moving to new locations. This has happened hundreds of times over the last several hundred million years. A whole new viewpoint of the Earth’s magnetics, called geomagnetics, is beginning to be understood. From space, would this not appear as a pulse? 62