HANG on to your compass—the Earth’s poles might be starting to flip. So say researchers who’ve seen strange anomalies in our planet’s magnetic field.
The magnetic field is created by the flow of molten iron inside the Earth’s core. These circulation patterns are affected by the planet’s rotation, so the field normally aligns with the Earth’s axis —forming the north and south poles.
But the way minerals are aligned in ancient rock shows that the planet’s magnetic dipole occasionally disappears altogether, leaving a much more complicated field with many poles all over the planet. When the dipole comes back…
