One of the more curious things about our planet is the wandering of the magnetic north. At any given moment, the pointing of your compass is only mostly pointing toward our planet’s rotational axis. Currently, the north pole is racing toward Siberia after hanging out in Canada since at least 1831, when it was located by explorer James Clark Ross. The accelerating motion of the pole has made many wonder if our world is about to experience a magnetic flip so that your compass will change where it points, while our planet’s orientation otherwise remains unchanged.

It’s postulated that during a magnetic field flip, we’ll have a period of less protection from high energy particles and the solar wind, and generally it’s thought such a flip could be problematic for civilization as we know it. Trying to figure out just how much danger we’re in has become a topic for a lot of folks, and a new study looked at a new set of variables that seem to indicate that we’re probably ok for now.

Lava is often rich in metals that will orient with the Earth’s magnetic fields as they solidify. The amount of orientation is related to the strength of the magnetic field. This means that the lava fields around long active volcanoes and the newly forming material along the mid-ocean divide all contain a record of the Earth’s magnetic field strength and orientation over time. In general, researchers have looked for a relationship between how the magnetic field moves and how likely it is to flip, and a relationship just hasn’t been established.

Now, in new results presented at AGU by Courtney Sprain, an international team looks instead for a relationship between the strength of the magnetic field and the likelihood it will flip. This, it turns out, is the relationship to watch. When Earth’s magnetic field gets weak, it is gearing up to turn over, and that is the signal that things are about to get rough.

For now, our magnetic field is strong, and we should be fine, and we have a cool new set of variables to study through the geologic record.

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