During a pole reversal, Earth’s magnetic poles swap locations ... And it’s not just us for whom a flip could mess things up.

Imagine waking up one morning to a world where compasses point south instead of north, where auroras shimmer across the ...

Every so often, our planet's magnetic poles reverse polarity (see When Compasses Point South). Compass needles have always pointed north; in a reversal, they would point south. You could perhaps ...

Would a dramatic change in the Earth's magnetic field ... field's strength or even a reversal? Or might extinctions, perhaps mass extinctions, be in the offing? Animal magnetism One of the first ...

Perhaps, Clement says, the magnetic field shrinks to essentially nothing, leaving several "mini-poles ... how the reversals might affect navigation by migrating birds and other animals that ...

Magnetic pole flips happen randomly, sometimes taking 10,000 to 50 million years. The last full reversal, the Brunhes–Matuyama event, occurred 780,000 years ago. Around 41,000 years ago ...

Then about a millennium later, those local poles would reform into one big magnetic north pole as the reversal process progressed. But a full reversal takes so long that people on Earth would be ...