The Earth, as has been known for hundreds of years, since William Gilbert in 1600, produces a magnetic field which causes compass needles to align in a north-south direction. For more than a century, we have known that the seat of the geomagnetic field lies at or near the center of the Earth. We also know that there is an energy source residing there that continuously supplies energy to sustain the magnetic field; otherwise the field would soon collapse because energy is drawn from the field by its interactions with matter of the Earth. For decades, though, there has been much confusion in the geo-science community as to the nature of the energy source that powers the mechanism which generated the geomagnetic field. That confusion arises as a consequence of a mistake made in about 1940 by Francis Birch and others, which remained uncorrected for decades.

The outer portion of the Sun, the meteorites, the Earth, the Moon, and presumably all the objects in the Solar System formed from matter of common origin. A whole class of meteorites, called chondrites, have elemental compositions like that of the non-volatile part of the photosphere of the Sun. There is good reason to think that the Earth is made of matter like that of one or more chondrite meteorites; and, that is what Birch and others thought. The problem is that there are three major types of chondrites, which differ significantly in oxygen content. Birch and others assumed that the Earth was like the most common type, the so-called ordinary chondrites, while ignoring the less abundant enstatite chondrites.

In 1936 Inge Lehmann discovered the inner core of the Earth. To explain its existence, in terms of the Earth supposedly being like an ordinary chondrite, necessitated the assumption that the inner core is partially crystallized iron metal. J. Marvin Herndon envisioned a different possibility, realizing that, if elemental silicon were in the core, the silicon under appropriate conditions could combine with nickel and precipitate an inner core of nickel silicide having just the mass observed. In 1979 Herndon published the basis for this idea in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (click here for pdf). For Herndon, this was the beginning of a logical progression of understanding leading to evidence that the inner 82% of the Earth is like an enstatite chondrite, not an ordinary chondrite as previously thought, which in turn lead to a wholly different understanding of the internal composition of Earth. For details about Earth, the basis for its origin, composition, and dynamics, please see http://UnderstandEarth.com .

So, why does this matter? The interior of Earth, being like an enstatite chondrite, formed under circumstances which severely limited available oxygen. As a consequence, certain oxygen-loving elements occur in full or in part in the Earth's core, instead of in the Earth's mantle. This is the justification for understanding that a great proportion of uranium occurs in the Earth's core, like it does, for example, in the alloy part of the Abee enstatite chondrite.

It was only a small step to extend the nuclear reactor concept to the center of the Earth, which J. Marvin Herndon published in the Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity in 1993 (click here for pdf) and in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1994 (click here for pdf). Unlike other planetary-scale energy sources, the energy output of a nuclear reactor can be variable, possibly even shutting down and re-starting. Herndon has suggested that the polarity reversals of Earth’s geomagnetic field might in some way be traceable to such variable georeactor energy production.

So now there was some justification for the existence of an energy source for the geomagnetic field located just where it would be needed to provide driving power for the mechanism that generates the geomagnetic field. But this was only the beginning of a logical progression of understanding which would lead to fundamental advances and new insights, as detailed in this website. There is much, much more to the story.