Treasure hunting with a compass

the compass would deviate if there was a magnet nearby...naturally occuring of course...since I'm SURE they'd never rig something like that

perhaps legend has it that jesse buried his treasure near a site like that (that is...IF he ever buried a treasure...which is highly unlikely)

Legand has it he buried most of his loot. They are going off markers that were left for him to go back at a later date and retrieve it. He had a bunch of sites. Sometime in the last decade someone found one of the stashes according to some article I read a while back.

You were watching show produced by a conman only interested in getting people to donate to him.

That entire show was a sham.

Metal objects can indeed make a compass deviate from magnetic North. In Boy Scouts, we show how your compass can be affected if you put a map on a picnic table and then set your compass on the map. The steel carriage bolts in the table (& under the map) will affect the compass and you'll have the wrong bearing. Try using a compass over the trunk of your car and see how off it is, too!
Now, will they find buried treasure like that? I dunno...never tried it! Try walking over your septic tank with a compass and see if the needle moves. Just a thought.

If you had a compass and a plumb-bob you could be king of the world!

Jason in Enid said:

You were watching show produced by a conman only interested in getting people to donate to him.

That entire show was a sham.

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Yep, I've seen the show and it is a bunch of BS.

gordonquixote said:

If you had a compass and a plumb-bob you could be king of the world!

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That would be like dividing by zero.....no one man can, or should, posses that much power.

I'm sure there are a lot of things that effect the accuracy of a compass. You have to figure that this is a very old instrument, invented before metal was so widely used, long before any sort of electronics. Not entirely sure if it was ever considered to be 100% accurate, but worked a whole lot better than stars on a cloudy night...

Finding treasure with one... Probably not any better than just digging random holes.

bigstemz said:

...they were using a compass at at certian areas it would deviate from north by up to 30 degree...does anyone know how the compass deviates like that...

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Either the compass users were a bunch of morons that don't know how to use a compass or the show misrepresented the facts as part of the hype. The latter is not only more likely, but is also the main reason I despise the media and why I hold them mainly responsible for the dumbing down of america. Producers always place ratings and royalties above facts and reality; it's how they make their living.

First off, there are very few places on earth where the declination of a compass is zero degrees - and if you wait a few years, even that will probably change. Most of the continental US has declinations of around 10-20 degrees.

But 2 things happen constantly (albeit slowly) on the geomagnetic sphere: First, both poles are always wandering around, and second, so are the magnetic fields between them. Many airports have to renumber their runways every few years in order to concur with current magnetic headings.

Also, the magnetic lines between the poles aren't anywhere near as neat and sweet as you see in a highschool physics lab with a bar magnet. A geomagnetic field map looks more like a weather map, with curvy lines and sworls all over the place. While many deviatians can be fairly localized, you aren't going to get 30 degree differences in readings from walking around with a compass, and if you do then whatever is causing it would be extremely obvious to anyone with more than 2 brain cells.

Just a pre-emptive thought here to address any "yeahbutts": a couple of cast iron strongboxes buried a few feet down isn't going to effect a compass reading in any noticeable or useful way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination