It is known that Earth’s magnetic field has flipped many times throughout the planet’s history. Its dipole magnetic field remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens (such is the case now) and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction. A new study, however, shows that the final stage - a sudden 180-degree flip - can happen within a human lifetime.
The new study was done by a team of scientists from Italy, France and USA and it demonstrates that the last magnetic reversal of Earth's poles which happened some 786 000 years ago actually happened very quickly, in less than 100 years.
The discovery comes shortly after ESA's "Swarm" satellite array revealed that the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century.
Though a magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by convection in Earth’s iron core, there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals, despite much searching in the ...
