2012--tick tick tick

Everyone by now has heard that the end of the world or some other catastrophe is scheduled for 2012, supposedly predicted by the Mayans whose calendar ends at the winter solstice. This sounds like one of those fun facts that don't really mean anything, and all the kooks running around blabbing about 2012 will start talking about aliens, or crystals, or Atlantis in the next breath. For those of us of a bit more rational frame of mind, the question is whether this date corresponds to anything in reality. It does.

The Winter Solstice (~21 December) 2012 is when the North Pole will be oriented farthest away from the Galactic Center (GC) in its 26,000 year wobble. The Galactic Center is important in Ancient mythology. It is not marked by a star, but is instead the intersection of two imagined lines in the constellation Sagittarius. It is easily spotted however. Scorpios's stinger and Sagittarius' arrow point toward it. Even Santa's Sleigh points toward it.

The two imaginary lines are the equator of the solar system (ecliptic) and the equator of the galaxy. These meet near the GC, in the densest (whitest and widest) part of the Milky Way. The GC itself is as turbulent as the heart of the sun, and its nature is of current interest to astrophysicists and astrologers. As the earth slowly wobbles on its axis, the orientation of the earth and the galaxy goes through four positions (when the earth's equatorial line (the meridian) crosses the intersection of the ecliptic and Milky Way.

These four positions are the key to understanding the deepest layers of mythology as I described in an earlier post. This wobble (technically called precession of the equinoxes), along with other orbital factors, drives long climate change, certainly a hot topic today.

Personally, I find it interesting that the four phases correspond with major shifts in climate: the glacial maximum, the melting of the ice caps, the younger dryas episode, and the desertification of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. These events happened about 6000 years apart. Now we are observing rapid climate change as we approach the 2012 event. Astronomy and climate, we have only recently come to fully appreciate, are deeply intertwined.