Over the past six months, the Earth's magnetic field has been weakening at a rate ten times faster than originally predicted, according to the European Space Agency.
Our magnetic field, which is thought to be generated by the motion of molten iron in the Earth's outer core, extends 600,000 kilometres above the surface of the planet and protects us from blasts of solar radiation. It's also responsible for the incredible displays of aurorae in the Earth's high latitudes.
In November 2013, The European Space Agency launched a trio of satellites called Swarm, with the aim of providing high-precision, high-resolution measurements of variations in the Earth's magnetic field. The first data back indicates that the field is weakening at a rate of about five percent per decade.
That's rather faster than the rate previously predicted of five percent per century, and suggests that a flip of the Earth's magnetic poles may happen rather sooner than the previous estimate of 2,000 years' time. Weak spots have already started to appear over the Western Hemisphere, shown as blue in the image above.
But don't worry - the process is still expected to take several hundred, or even thousand, years, and there's no evidence that past flips caused mass extinctions or even radiation damage to living things. Power grids and communications networks may struggle, but humans should survive unscathed.
While we wait for that to occur, we can only observe the Earth's fluctuating magnetic field, and the meandering of magnetic north -- which is currently headed towards Siberia.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
