they have to over-egg the pudding and make up
some completely daft pseudo-scientific claptrap to explain the phenomenon.


Just because you fail to understand the scientific answer to this or any
other explanation, does not mean it is clap trap. There may be a number of
explanations which some are understood by one or two people but not by
others and another explanation understood by them, but not by the former.

A chunk of metal lying around long enough, will pick up the magnetic
signature of the Earth, move that chunk of metal to another position and not
lying in the same North South, or East West position, will give off a minute
signature to the soil, or in the case of ships, the sea. That is one way
Magnetic Mines work, they are detonated by the change of magnetic signature
around them, i,e, a big chink of steel passing above them. If you would like
to look at the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth when on WWII service, you will
see huge great cables hung around their sides. These are Degaussing (sp)
cables and a current was passed through them, for a period in one direction,
and then changed to the other direction, to set up a magnetic field which
altered and thus hopefully, detonate the mine away from the ship. What you
are seeing in the slug/snail explanation, "could" be the fact that by using
copper tools, there is no magnetic signature left as they said. Copper does
not have a magnetic signature unless carrying a current.

You might say that the signature might be very small. It would be, but if I
tell you that I was assisting an Electronics Engineer to measure the
conductivity of very dry sand, an insulator, then you might understand that
magnetism, and thus electricity, works in strange ways.

Mike