Is Earth’s Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?

[Earth’s Colorful Atmospheric Layers Photographed from Space]

It’s no news that the pole is moving; long-term records from London and Paris (kept since 1580) show that the north magnetic pole moves erratically around the rotational north pole over periods of a few hundred years or longer, Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist with the British Geological Survey who is involved in WMM updates, told Space.com in an email. Of course, a bar magnet is not a perfect representation — it’s actually electric currents that generate the Earth’s magnetic field — but the model makes it easier to imagine what’s happening to Earth, Merrill added. That’s because the pole is located in a remote area and the measurement of Earth’s magnetic field is influenced by all magnetic-field sources — including the magnetic fields found in Earth’s atmosphere (the ionosphere and magnetosphere).

Source: www.space.com