Earth’s magnetic poles are just experiencing a “soft spot” that will probably disappear in a few hundred years.
In new research, scientists walk back the popular idea that Earth’s magnetic poles will flip at some point soon—an event that would occur for the first time in tens of thousands of years. And while it wouldn’t be the end of the world by any means, it would complicate a lot of things for us. All of that means it’s good news that we likely won’t see a flip for at least a few hundred more years.
In the new paper, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Lund University in Sweden and Oregon State University identify some of Earth’s current magnetic anomalies and position them in the larger context of the last 9,000 years. Amazingly, we have pretty complete magnetic field data over that entire period. But to understand what’s going on, first we should take a crash course in Earth’s magnetic field.
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