User:Rudolf Pohl

Place of Birth

Born October the 8th 1952 in Ruhpolding, Upper Bavaria, Germany.

I'm a native Germanspeaker, but my true mother tongue is Bavarian, in which I'm called Rudi or familiarly Rude or Rudl.

My place of birth forms part of the Chiemgau region of southeastern Bavaria and is situated right at the northern edge of the Northern Calcareous Alps, a northward thrusted unit of the Eastern Alps. The geology of my home is very complicated and is dominated by three major nappes.

My place of birth is below and on the northern slopes of a hill called Adlerhügel (eagle's hill — 772 metres) south of Buchschachen, one of the oldest settlement places in our valley going back to Carolingian days. The farm was called Schachnerhof — the farm taking up the name of the locality.

Early Life

My house of birth, the *Schachnerhof* in Buchschachen, Ruhpolding. I was born in the flat with balcony on the far right end.

My first four years I grew up on the farm which I adored and therefore was a Schachner Bua. We (that is my mother's clan) were cattle farmers. Due to some dispute my parents then left the Schachnerhof and moved further east to Schwaig, where they rented a flat on the first floor in a house owned by a factory, which employed both my parents. Schwaig was right next to the river Weiße Traun which drains our valley to the North. The woods along the river were a perfect childhood adventure place.

I started schooling fairly late in October 1959. After four years of Grundschule (primary school) in Ruhpolding I was able to rejoin in October 1963 the Gymnasium (Chiemgau Gymnasium — a highschool) in Traunstein, the district city of our Landkreis situated 14 kilometers to the north — already out in the morainic lowlands. In highschool I opted for natural science with English and Latin as foreign languages. Our class I represented as class president for quite some time. In June 1972 I finished my highschool education as a member of class 13b with very good results in the Abitur.

My major hobby those days became mountaineering. While on a summer trip with some school friends into the Tennengebirge in Austria in the summer of 1970 we met a group of Americans who joined up with us on this little expedition. To show their gratefulness they invited us to come and visit them in Missouri, which I did after my final highschool exam. So in summer 1972 I left Europe for the first time and flew to the United States to meet up with them in Springfield. I stayed about a month with my friends in Missouri, who also had a house in the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. As I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean I then hitchhiked to Los Angeles crossing the splendid Southwest of the United States experiencing a landscape I had never seen before. From Los Angeles I followed the whole Pacific coast North to Vancouver. There I decided to carry on going North through British Columbia right up to Alaska. Worked a while in Anchorage to fill up my pockets again and then returned South via Denali and the Yukon into the Great Lakes region and from there headed back to New York City. Back at home in Germany the Army was waiting for me and I had to start my military servive in October in Cologne. I served till June 1974 and left the military as a private in Mannheim. I was in the NATO staff, so I spent a lot of time with the American troops as a translator, like in Kaiserslautern or in Heidelberg — all little Americas within Western Germany. Mind you I much preferred the American Army than my stiff German troops.

Academics

Author working out in the garden here on my property in France

After my military service I went straight back to the United States for intensive travels. Come October I enrolled at the University of Minnesota as a freshman in the geology department. The year at UoM was followed by three years geosciences at the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany, from where I received my BSc in 1978 with top grade.

Then I changed over to environmental science and did one year as a sabbatical at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Thereafter I left university, did a professional training in carpentry in Norwich, worked a while on building sites, but also in a wholefood cooperative. In 1979 I made my first attempts in translating books from English to German. First without much success, but come 1985 I was able to make a good living from the translation work.

My academic training was rounded off in 1984 with a year at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France, studying structural geology & remote sensing, finishing with a tectonic map and an interpretation of the Eastern Alps gleaned from satellite imagery; the results were incorporated into my unpublished French DEA thesis (equivalent to a Master of Philosophy): The Eastern Alps and their Lineaments (Les Alpes Orientales et leurs linéaments). Due to this I'm therefore a fluent French speaker now.

Field Geology

Being a fervent adept of geological education in the field I have gained lots of first-hand experience via field courses, field mapping, excursions, private travels and mountaineering expeditions in the following countries and terrains:

Austria
- Hohe Tauern window
- Tennengebirge
England
- Cornwall - Cornubian batholith
- Lake District
- Norfolk - Quaternary, Cretaceous
France
Germany
Greece
- Crete
Iceland
- Þingvellir
- Vestmannaeyjar
Ireland
- Donegal - Granitoids
Italy
- Adamello-Presanella
- Brenta Group
- Elba
- Etna
- Stromboli and Lipari Islands
- Vesuvius
Morocco
Norway
- Oslo graben
Scotland
- Orkney
- Skye
- Torridonian
Spain
- Baetic Cordillera
Switzerland
- Pennines
United States
Wales
- Snowdon

But I also did research and laboratory work in structural geology under my structural geology professor Peter Hudlestone.

Profession

Since leaving Paris I have been working as a freelance translator in the three languages English-French-German, which I can interchange at wish.

I have translated several books in very different subjects, but also scientific articles and abstracts.

Worked in wholefood shops and in a bookshop collective for quite some time.

Being a trained carpenter and now also a "freemason" I have gained quite a bit of experience in the building trade.

Geodynamics

Foliation data of the Piégut-Pluviers Granodiorite in the stereo net

My main interest though still resides in Geodynamics — the Earth's Snake Power as Native Americans might call it.

I am particularly interested in the connection of large-scale structures with flow phenomena as observable in the atmosphere & oceans.

I do therefore interprete the Alpine whorl — obviously my favourite topic — as a vortex structure, part of a much larger flow (system).

Hence my renewed interest in fluid dynamics and my problem in accepting the standard textbook plate tectonics paradigm — which in my esteem is way too rigid !

My principle is: watching a satellite slow motion condensing the last twelve hours of meteorological happening on parts of our globe will give you more insight about geotectonic structures than a whole stack of textbooks ! Because you can observe them being played out in front of your very own eyes.

Analogies within the fluid dynamic systems atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere

At the first glance it might appear unlikely, strange and even counterintuitive, that the three big spheres of our home planet Earth do show analogies, similarities and even self-similarities in structures they harbour — despite representing the fundamentally different physical states gaseous, liquid and solid. Intuitively one expects a certain interrelation between the gaseous atmosphere and the liquid oceans — yet a relation of those two spheres to the Earth's crust — the ground we are standing on and which appears rigid and immobile — seems totally aberrant.

But this is exactly where I'm driving at — this base is NOT immobile and has to be treated like the other two spheres in a fluid dynamic way. The answer to this paradox lies of course in the factor time — dimensions of time that depass our limited life spans of a hundred years at maximum and render — over millions of years — in an unnoticeable yet relentless way solid rocks into deformable objects.

Structures in the Earth's atmosphere

I want to start with the most dynamic of our three spheres — the Earth's atmosphere. Our European latitudes are characterized by the general west wind drift caused by the Earth's rotation — causing depressions like the passing stormy low pressure regions in the North Atlantic and the medicanes in the Mediterranean.

The driving force behind all these phenomena is a jet (not to be mistaken with the jet stream circulating at high altitude) — a straight air current of high windspeed. The major characteristic of jets is that after some time their head starts deforming into a mushroom-like structure. This structure consists of two halves — a cyclonic left part that rotates anticlockwise and an anticyclonic right part rotating clockwise (on the southern hemisphere the sense of rotation is reversed). Due to the Coriolis force the left part is usually more pronounced, whereas the right part is less developed due to shearing and sometimes can go completely missing.

Ideally jets have a rounded stem and a radial, backward-folding, mushroom-like head region. Structural examples are plumes, diapirs, mushroom clouds of volcanic eruptions, impact events and nuclear explosions. They all have in common, that they rise vertically against gravity. Jets on the other hand propagate in a layered fashion horizontally. The Earth's atmosphere being a relatively thin, density-stratified layer jets become flattened. Satellite images show this very well, they also allow to judge their speed — about 100 to 150 kilometers per hour.

Sketch of a vortex dipole. The two halves of the mushroom head region rotate in an opposite sense.

The illustration is a sketch of a jet — a basic fluid dynamic structure also known as a vortex dipole. The dipole consists of two cells that rotate against each other. A jet's head can reduce to a monopole exemplified by hurricanes in the subtropics and tropics. Quadrupoles can form as well — like when two jets hit each other head on or diametrically move away from each other. Jet structures can also form in the wake of obstacles — like the Kármán vortex street. In this case the individual jets form an interdigitating series 90° set apart.

Structures in the world's oceans

Jets are not limited to the atmosphere, they also occur in the density-stratified oceans. Good examples are usually found near coasts, caused either by coast-parallel longshore drift or at the end of rip currents. Well known are eddies in front of Kamchatka or Haida Gwaii. The illustration shows well developed vortices in front of Haida Gwaii — but also at the same time a great jet in the atmosphere pushing up northwest onto the coast of Alaska and unfolding its mushroom head. Remarkable is the difference in scale of the two fluid dynamic systems — the oceanic vortices being smaller by a factor of 10. The unfolding ot the oceanic vortices is also a lot slower — with a typical velocity of 0.1 meter/second or 0.36 kilometers/hour.

In the atmosphere jets and their mushroom heads are well expressed by clouds (i.e. condensed water vapour). In the oceans jets are a lot harder to identify — directly most often only in polar seas, where they can be recognized by pack ice covered in fresh snow. Phytoplankton also yields a valuable indirect reconnaissance method — due to the fact, that chlorophyll acts as a marker which can be discerned by satellite-bound instruments like SeaWiFS. Thereafter the data are processed and reproduced on images. The image in front of Haida Gwaii has been taken by SeaWiFS.

Oceanic jets show already a much more chaotic structure compared with their atmospheric counterparts — thus indicating common and longlasting turbulences in the oceans. Turbulences are characteristic for fluid dynamic systems and are strongly time dependent. They show the tendency to evolve from a chaotic initial state to much simpler yet larger scale structures. This is achieved by the successive amalgamation of cells with the same rotational sense.

Extraterrestrial example

Jets and turbulences are not restricted to planet Earth, but can for instance dramatically be observed in the atmosphere of planet Jupiter.

Structures of the solid crust

Let me begin the search for analogies with the solid crust in our youngest and still active orogen — the Alps and in general the entire alpidic chain. Satellite images taken from space clearly show that the Alps resemble an atmospheric jet — the orogen itself representing the mushroom head. The arc of the Western Alps forms the left wing of the mushroom head and therefore indicates a cyclonic, counterclockwise rotational sense. The center of the rotation is situated in the western Po valley near Turin. It is interesting to note that the rotational center is right in the middle of a pronounced positive gravity anomaly tied to the Ivrea mass, which represents dense and heavy mantle rocks risen to the surface.

The rotational center of this Genua depression is somewhat further south in the Ligurian Sea — otherwise the configuration is very similar and comparable. The jet's stem is oriented NNE and slightly offset, but this can be explained by the cyclonic rotation of the Apennine (the Apennine is younger than the Alps and together with Corsica underwent a cyclonic rotation by more than 30°). When the rotation is cancelled out we have the situation as on the right image. Is it a coincidence that the Genua depression takes up almost the same position as the Alpine orogen?

One has to add at this point that the Alpine orogen does not only consist of the snow-covered parts, but also incorporates the Jura Mountains, the Dauphiné and all the French Prealps right down to the Provence. This last region exemplifies nicely the turning in of the individual mountain chains into the counterclockwise direction.

When you study the Alpine orogen closely, you notice that it consists of two very different halves — the Western Alps and the Eastern Alps. The border between these two parts runs roughly from Lake Konstanz in the North to Lago Maggiore in the South. The Western Alps are structurally much more simple and form a shear pile squeezed towards the West onto the European foreland, yet at the same time undergoing a cyclonic rotation. The Eastern Alps are characterized by huge nappe piles which overrode deeper units in a northerly direction more or less horizontally. These flat-lying nappes can be seen well exposed in the Engadin window. The Western Alps do have a few nappes as well (like the |helminthoid-flysch), but they are of a more local scale and certainly don't reach the dimensions of the nappes in the Eastern Alps.

Considering now these fundamentally different geological relationships one can deduce that the Eastern Alps should be attributed to the right anticyclonal mushroom head. This assumption is backed by the arc of the Carpathian Mountains which prolongs the Eastern Alps and also forms quite a big anticyclonal vortex structure (see the map below).

Moving further East along the alpidic orogen we finally arrive at the huge Indonesian arc structure which ends in the Banda Sea in a tight, 180° loop. Probably this island arc also forms the mushroom head of an enormous jet whose stem is over Borneo and the Philippines. Therefore the jet was streaming in from the Northeast. The terminating Banda arc at the eastern end most likely is a cyclonic vortex structure.

Plate tectonic map of the Indonesian island arc

Critical stance on plate tectonics

Despite a range of supporting arguments (like for instance cinematics) plate tectonics (PT) is an unproven hypothesis, because it can not yet explain lots of phenomena and their causing forces free of contradictions. One of the major criticisms of PT and its supporters is the lack of respect for geological facts systematically unravelled on the continents over the last 150 years, but also the far too overrated yet not stringent generalization of geophysical results gained in the oceanic domain. Other drawbacks are not fully elucidated mechanisms of plate motions and also the concepts of subduction and convection.

Before going any further I would like to point out, that all theories and hypotheses only concentrate on one aspect of reality and worse, that they tend to dogmatize this aspect and depict it as ultimate truth — yet at the same time ignore other factors that don't fit in with the stipulated theory.

Often it is overlooked, that nature is organized and working in an integrative way — light for instance can appear as a particle (photon) but at the same time as a wave. So in nature we don't find either/or but rather either/and — allowing several possibilities at the same time. Therefore I strongly presume that in the crust we have several mechanisms operating simultaneously.

Having been confronted with the irrefutable analogies between the three spheres atmoshere, hydrosphere and lithosphere I shall procede now to a critical look at plate tectonics. To start with I want to look at the term itself (even if this seems a bit small-minded) in order to illuminate the essentials of the new paradigm.

Definition

In my opinion the term plate is a bad — and not to say wrong concept. Planet Earth is a flattened rotational ellipsoid on which straight planes do not exist anywhere. Therefore the term plate is a mental construct of no merit on a spheroidal body. Geometrically more appropriate would be to use the term shell or spherical segment.

This misnomer already reveals the first weakness of the theory. The reason is probably historical, as in mechanics plates are simple geometrical bodies. Elasticity theory uses this simplicity to calculate the forces that act upon plates analog to other bodies like beams, lintels and pillars. One thus realizes that plate tectonics from the outset is an enormous oversimplification of nature, in order to render it comprehensible and calculable. The same mentality created the term slab — originally a flat piece of rock — to indicate the downgoing oceanic crust during subduction. This simplification implies a homogeny that doesn't exist anywhere. All our continents are amalgamated terranes with a complex, long and differing evolution. Therefore continents can not be conceived as a uniform mechanical entity - yet this is exactly what is insinuated by using the term plate.

Starting point for a realistic treatment should be a spherical shell-approach — as is exemplified clearly by our atmosphere, our oceans and our continents. These planetary shells are fairly thin — the main mass of the atmosphere (the troposphere) is about 10 kilometers thick, the oceans are on average not deeper than 5 kilometers and the continents show an average thickness of 35 to 40 kilometers. So these are certainly very thin shells — and no plates.

History

Historically plate tectonics is an outgrowth of continental drift founded by Alfred Wegener between 1912 and 1915. Yet in 1906 Otto Ampferer had already developed his subfluence (Unterströmungstheorie in German). Both theories are mobilistic and run counter to fixism —being the predominant theory in the 19th century and which only considered vertical movements. Wegener's starting point was the well-known excellent fit between the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa. The fit is even better when one considers the shelf edge instead of the coastlines themselves.

The paradigm change to mobilistic plate tectonics happened around 1960. Fundamental new discoveries about the geology of the ocean floors were due to mainly English-speaking geoscientists — marine geologists and oceanographers — like Harry Hammond Hess, Robert S. Dietz, Bruce C. Heezen, Marie Tharp and John Tuzo Wilson. The results were summarized in the principle of seafloor spreading. Of importance is the fact that the new paradigm of plate tectonics was conceived on the oceanic crust and not on the continental crust.

The concept of seafloor spreading then was enlarged in 1963 by the Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis. In this hypothesis Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews interpreted in their paleomagnetic studies the stripe pattern on both sides of the mid-ocean ridges as a consequence of neoformation and spreading of the ocean floors.

In the late sixties (1967 and 1968) in several scientific publications a model was elaborated which became the founding stone of the plate tectonic theory. The authors were amongst others Dan McKenzie and Robert L. Parker, W. Jason Morgan, Xavier Le Pichon and Bryan L. Isacks. The model supposed that the Earth's surface was covered by rigid plates, which were separated from each other by different types of boundaries. New oceanic crust was formed at mid ocean ridges and then was recycled at deep ocean trenches. Unfortunately the proposed model consisted only of a package of generalizing, mainly cinematic postulates and suppositions. Despite a few smaller additions and brush-ups this state of affairs hasn't changed till this very day.

The primal engine of plate tectonics was presumed to be situated in the newly discovered mid ocean ridges. These ridges form a mainly submarine, volcanically active, mountainous range with a total length of 80.000 kilometers, of which 65.000 kilometers are continuous. Yet this fact poses already one of the major problems of PT, because the model of mantle convection stipulates — by honouring mass balance — that the upwelling fresh mantle material has to be balanced on both sides of the spreading centre by an equally strong downwelling along the deep sea trenches.^[1] Accordingly one should find trenches with a total length of 130.000 to 160.000 kilometers. But in reality only 30.000 to 40.000 kilometers of trenches are known. This rather serious discrepancy between theory and reality is enhanced by the fact that contrary to what is expected there are no trenches surrounding Africa.

Personal matters

I'm not married and also have got no children, though I had many relationships and nearly became father once. The core of my family has vanished by now. My father Franz Rudolf died already back in November 1978. Father was followed by mother Emerentia Pohl, born Beilhack, in November 1989. My half brother Josef Martin Kögl aka Sepp left me very suddenly on November 19th 2021. I had been looking after Sepp as his tutor (he was mentally handicapped) since the death of my mother for more than twenty years. Since 1991 he lived with me here in France. His death left a big void in my life and made me feel very sad and depressed. But time no one can stop ... the samsara wheel keeps on turning and churning. Shortly after my 60th birthday I fell prey to this hideous disease called COPD, but I managed to keep the illness in check with natural healing methods. Right up to my 60th birthday I always had been in perfect health ... climbing vertical cliffs and even was windsurfing out on the Atlantic.

Politics

As a student of geology and ecology I really interiorized the core principles and messages of these natural sciences and hence it is not difficult to guess my political camp. During my student days in Göttingen I was a student representative for two years and represented the geoscience students in the AStA, the student governing body. These were interesting days, as one had to speak in front of thousands of people. I also was cofounder of one of the first environmental groups at our department in 1975. This led onto the antinuclear movement, which started to become very strong in Western Germany those days. Together with my physics friend Werner Schneider we published the Atomexpress — the leading antinuke paper. I was also partaking in lots of demonstrations — some rather violent, as the German State tried to intimidate and squall any kind of protest brutally from the beginning. While living in England I also joined direct action against nuclear establishments like for example Capenhurst and mass protests like at Torness. With Howard Clarke — one of the publishers of the Peace News collective — we staged in summer 1980 an antinuclear cycle ride all around Britain holding conferences and protesting at nearly all the sites we went past. Near the reprocessing plant Sellafield we were forced off the road by some workers in their pick-up trucks and went down over the cliff-like embankment. This was attempted murder, but we survived heavily bruised and the bicycles completely mangled up — yet we were able to continue the trip after a few days rest and repairs.

My political position is not only influenced by ecology but also by libertarian ideas. For me there is no doubt who is to blame for all the environmental destructions which have driven planet Earth into the unknow territory of existential survival. The brutality of our times forces one to bring dharma ie divine principles to the fore. It is more than clear what has to happen now: absolute nonviolence (ahimsa) and a lifestyle that respects a symbiosis with our environment and doesn't exploit nature thereby dooming it to slow death.

In human relations I negate any kind of government and any form of slavery. We are all equal and no one has the right to dominate and bully others. It is high time to totally transform today's societies and direct them towards a meaningful goal. By the looks of it we won't have much time nor leeway anymore.

Human history is a declaration of bankruptcy since about 2 million years and I can't see any betterment for the near future. What sort of intelligence is it to know only destruction and what sort of ingeniosity to increase the bestiality of modern weaponry ? Not one single year passes on this globe without a major mass slaughtering.

Especially frightening is the steady rise of fascism worldwide, the advance of religious fanatics and misogynistic chauvinists and the increase in authoritarian and autocratically ruled nation states. The war in Ukraine and the Gaza genocide are only the tip of the iceberg. This downgrading of morality leads us directly to the abyss of the human psyche.

Philosophy

Philosophically I see myself as a positivist and as a panentheist. Which means I recognize a higher force in my life — a power (or god if you like) which is at the root of everything we recognize and live through. Nothing estranges me more than the concept of a void or of nothing personified in nihilism. As a geologist and natural scientist I have been raised in the materialist tradition. To me it is evident that the reductionist, scientific approach is valuable and can yield good results, but at the same time I'm convinced that it doesn't represent the final truth — in Indian philosophy we would refer to this misconception as माया (maya) — or that which isn't (the way we think it is).

I'm an adept of Vedanta, in particular of its branch Achintya Bheda Abheda — the latter expressing the paradox, that we are at the same time unified with yet also separated from our source of energy — the atman and thence the paramatman. This means that I'm well aware of my essential qualities, yet I'm also conscious of the fact that I never will be able to understand God's absolute might. Too bad, but that doesn't mean to stop stretching out to the Lord — on the contrary.

Us humans should be grateful that the Allmighty has given us this beautiful blue marvel of our solar system as our abode — planet Earth. We are now at the zenith of life's evolution. Therefore it should be self-evident that we honour and rever God in the three aspects — eternal being (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ananda). At the same time we are summoned to accept and respect the natural order and to show love and understanding for all our co-travellers — humans, animals, plants and even inanimated substances. This is our dharma. But a close inspection in this 21. century clearly reveals to us that any kind of dharma has been completely forgotten by now.

We are reminded to reflect and meditate upon the creator as our sole root cause. The Lord then admonishes us to abandon any kind of toxic behaviour in our environment. This alone can be in our very own interest, everything else is merely noxious and ultimately self-destroying day-dreaming.

We therefore have to work on māyā in all its appearances in order to become ultimately free.

Māyā in my opinion is interpretaded wrongly all the time. It is NOT an illusion or deception (mohā, Sanskrit मोहा) as usually rendered, but an identification with the unreal, the not thus (मा in Sanskrit is a negation and means not, and या this, that or thus). So we are dealing here with a wrong or erroneous attribution.

This explains this modern tendency to so called propagandistic fake news — combined with an obsessive overrating of the ahamkara principle. And it sums up the illness of our modern society very well — living wrapped up in a self-concocted bubble of lies. Best example — the 2024 United States presidential election.

Now let's look at the Bhagavad Gita, verse 7:14:

दैवी ह्येषा गुणमयी मम माया दुरत्यया
मामेव ये प्रपद्यन्ते मायामेतां तरन्ति ते
daivī hy eṣā guṇa-mayī mama māyā duratyayā
mām eva ye prapadyante māyām etāṁ taranti te
My divine energy is composed of the three modifications of material nature and very difficult to transcend. But who comes to my feet in reverance can easily go beyond and break the spell.

— Bhagavad Gita, 7:14

The ignorance or erroneous identification is also caused by God (mama māyā), but can be overcome with loving devotion.

Alternatively one could say, that it is very hard to correctly conceive of God without erring.

A glance into Hindu philosophy somehow leads one to conclude, that with māyā God has done a very thorough job. This is almost ironic, as with no other term the opinions of our scholars differ that widely. As I see it no one really understands the ultimate reality behind the foreground, no one does come anywhere near. No one has got a clue. Therefore it is totally up to the divine flute player to show us how to procede.

The question remains why humans have such tremendous difficulties .... in refocussing and to refute the unreal/irreal ?

Esotericism and astrology

Our worldly career represents only the tip of the iceberg so to say, of which we only can see one tenth. The remaining nine tenths are enracinated deeply in our psychological unconscious. Henceforth the need to explore the psyche and esotericism in general. When I was working as a translator I intensively delved into esoteric themes and also wrote about it. To arrive at a holistic understanding of oneself it is absolutely necessary to lay bare the deep inner motives, to learn to recognize and integrate them.

Astrology is actually a very good medium to progress on meditative self knowledge. This of course is usually laughed at and put down by materialistically oriented humans and done away with as a sort of a hoax. Rightly so, because the majority of people misuses astrology in a very cheap and superficial way. It is often overlooked though that astrology and other esoteric practices like the kabbala or tarot hold no scientific claim whatsoever, but have been designed as a mirror of the soul.

My astrological sign is Libra — the scales. In chinese astrology I'm a water dragon. This underlines the prime importance of the fluid elements air and water in my life. In my birth horoscope the predominance of the element air can clearly be seen — further enhanced by the satellitium of four planets including the sun as its ruler. Despite this overwhelming constellation my personality — which abides in the ascendant — is governed by Capricorn — the sun sign of my mother. So if you like my mother reincarnated in her son. I don't think this is a coincidence. This also explains my deep love for the earth sciences. Altogether this is a highly versatile yet also harmonic horoscope which undoubtedly favours the collective side on the right half of the horoscope and not the egocentric left half (with the join IC-MC as dividing line).

Hobbies

My hobbies are mountaineering, climbing, skiing, swimming, biking, canoeing, windsurfing, rock & mineral hounding, vegetarian cooking, building, carpentry, music, animals (cats) & of course traveling.

New "old" home

I live now in La Côte — a medieval village near Nontron in "Jacquou le Croquant" country - i.e. in the Natural Park of the Périgord-Limousin Region (Parc naturel régional Périgord Limousin) in SW-France, where "Robin des Bois" hangs out...

Book Project — True Earth — the planet we think we know

Before I disappear into transcendance I want to write a book on our planet which not exclusively concentrates on materialistic aspects, but also incorporates us lifeforms and their spiritual dimensions — as life intimitally interacts with the physical since 3700 million years. I offer this book to our Lord Hari — the remover of all illusions.

So let me begin with the first verse of the Mandukya Upanishad:

हरिः ओम्
ओमित्येतदक्षरमिदं सर्वं तस्योपव्याख्यानं भूतं भवद्भविष्यदिति सर्वमोङ्कार एव यच्चान्यत्त्रिकालातीतं तदप्योङ्कार एव
„hariḥ om
omityetadakṣaramidaṃ sarvaṃ tasyopavyākhyānaṃ bhūtaṃ bhavadbhaviṣyaditi sarvamoṅkāra eva yaccānyattrikālātītaṃ tadapyoṅkāra eva“
„Hariḥ AUM.
The holy syllable AUM represents everything — the entire cosmos. An explanation is time under its aspects past, present and future. But everything beyond that trinity is also AUM.“

— Mandukya Upanishad, 1

Preface

This book is not meant to be another textbook in the geosciences. It rather tries to bring back the earth sciences onto ground zero — freed from any kind of speculation. The ground we are living on is our only possible living space — everything else is futuristic wishful thinking. All we really have got is the earth's surface. It provides everything we need for our survival — air to breathe, water to drink, food to keep us alive and resources for our homes and for heating purposes. The ground surface is the most important boundary layer on Earth and therefore a fundamental reality.

The boundary layer appears in two very different expressions — most of it is covered by liquid oceans and lakes, the smaller part by solid continents and islands, yet which are essential for our existence. Above this boundary layer we have everywhere the gaseous atmosphere, which thins with altitude, diminishes and gradually disappears into space.

Most humans spend their lives on solid ground — the ground to which our remains or ashes return. In order to fully comprehend our earthly existence it is thus absolutely necessary to really look at the ground underneath our feet in order to allow further insights.

Since a long time humanity has tried to penetrate deeper into the ground. At first for ritual tombs, drainage channels and other earthworks, later followed by mines to extract silex, minerals and metals. All these endeavours were rather limited in scale and haven't much increased the understanding for deeper layers. The deepest mine in South Africa now reaches a depth of more than 3.000 meters and the deepest drillhole on Kola ended at 12 kilometers depth. So we really only have scratched the very outer skin of the continental crust.

Mining can't go much deeper because of the excessive heat problem and drilling has also more or less reached its limit (mainly also due to heat). Therefore it is foreseeable, that a direct reconnaissance of deeper levels than the schizosphere won't progress much further. But this is not really that troublesome as in mountain ranges and orogens often much deeper crustal levels are exposed and therefore can be studied. In some volcanos and diatremes xenoliths are brought up from the mantle to the surface that originated at 100 kilometers depth. Meteorites bombard us and meteoritic dust is constantly being rained upon us, and these exoplanetary samples can provide us with valuable information about neighbouring planets, asteroids and comets.

Let's stay simple and start where we are. There's also no need to jet all over the planet and by doing so even further contribute in accelerating the destruction of the global environment. No, because every single locality on the Earth's solid surface contains its very own secrets. And this is where my book starts. I shall look at the place where I happen to be in a childlike way if you like - not influenced and untouched by any scientific scaffoldings. And likewise completely unimpressed by peers and the thousands of theories and hypotheses that are concocted in the ivory towers of human knowledge.

Were we to strictly apply Socrates'es approach to science we'd have to admit, that all the scientific disciplines are faulty and incapable to deliver a final answer for our universe. Our understanding for the phenomenon of life seems to be even worse and when it comes to an explanation for the final transcendental reality — the driving force behind everything — I'm afraid all of us are completely in the dark ! Dark matter rules.

I shall embark now on a direct and verifiable path. I'm not expecting anything big like Einstein's Unified Field Theory (which never came off the ground in the end and so even him had to become humble), but maybe the appearing thoughts and observations are worth some attention. Maybe I manage to inspire a few people on certain aspects and even open their eyes. Just that shall be my little reward. Hari AUM.

Introduction

Jokingly I once said at the beginning is always washing up to do (Abwasch in German — also with an A). Without it no new start.

In the beginning really was AUM, the letter alpha or alef or simply A. A like atmosphere, the German Atem (breath) or the Sanskrit atman. Our life starts with A — the first independent breather and the first intake of air. This primal necessity is enabled by the space above our boundary layer. With every breathtaking the atmosphere guarantees our further survival and by breathing we enter a very intimate connection with our gaseous surroundings. One can't repeat this primal fact of life often enough, especially when we come to the topic air pollution.

Chapter 1 will turn to the ubiquitous atmosphere and will try to fathom some of its lessons. A lot more than a simple look out of the window might suggest. To really experience the atmosphere it is absolutely necessary to leave our sheltered homes and come into direct contact with it. The atmosphere is a spherical (or spheroidal), highly mobile layer, that is governed by fluid dynamic principles to a very high degree.

Chapter 2 generally deals with the hydrosphere — including oceans, rivers and lakes. The hydrosphere has largely evolved out of the atmosphere and its precipitations. But water — often as steam — also wells up from the earth's interior as fountains, hot springs, geysers and black smokers (along midocean ridges). Because of its increasing viscosity the hydrosphere fluid dynamically is less mobile than the atmosphere.

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References

^ Dan P. McKenzie (1969), Speculations on the consequences and causes of plate motions, Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, v. 18, is. 1, pp. 1–32

[1] Dan P. McKenzie (1969), Speculations on the consequences and causes of plate motions, Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, v. 18, is. 1, pp. 1–32

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