Scientist Find Earth’s Magnetic Field Can Flip Much More Quickly Than Thought
The earth’s magnetic field has completely reversed itself, flipping the magnetic pole from north to south or vice-versa, more than once during the planet’s history. Scientists have long thought these flips took thousands of years to accomplish, but evidence shows the last flip about 786,000 years ago was completed in less than 100 years. A team of scientists came to this conclusion after studying data gathered on the magnetic field alignment of ancient lake sediments in the Sulmona basin of the Apennine Mountains east of Rome, Italy. Scientists were able to find and date the layer showing the reversal, and were surprised to see how quickly it happened. “What’s incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years,” said Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in- residence of earth and planetary science and a co-author of the study. “We