Giant 'Lava Lamp' Inside Earth May Cause Magnetic Poles to Flip
By Paula Koelemeijer, University of Oxford | May 15, 2017 03:49pm ET
Giant 'Lava Lamp' Inside Earth May Cause Magnetic Poles to Flip
Regions just above Earth's core, in the mantle layer, could behave like huge lava lamps, says one expert. There, blobs of the molten rock would periodically rise and fall, a phenomenon that could affect the planet's magnetic field.
Credit: Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock
If you could travel back in time 41,000 years to the last ice age, your compass would point south instead of north. That's because for a period of a few hundred years, the Earth's magnetic field was reversed. These reversals have happpened repeatedly over the planet's history, sometimes lasting hundreds of thousands of years. We know this from the way it affects the formation of magnetic minerals, that we can now study on the Earth's surface.
http://www.livescience.com/59113-giant-lava-lamp-hidden-inside-earth.html
