The Sun is preparing for a major event: the reversal of its magnetic field. This phenomenon marks a turning point in the solar cycle, signaling the transition from solar maximum to solar minimum. This ...

The last true sustained reversal of the magnetic poles happened around 780,000 years ago, and is named the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal after the geophysicists who first found evidence for it.

Additionally, magnetic reversals happen frequently on geological timescales (several hundred times in the past 160 million years), while recorded mass extinction events occur every hundred million ...

Evidence for sea-floor spreading arrived in 1963 when British geologists Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews looked at measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field taken by a research ship travelling ...

It’s literally a magnetic tape recorder. In this case, you were looking at the magnetic reversals recorded not under the sea but in the layers of rock in a mountain. The concept was similar. The ...

Earth’s days are getting longer The Earth’s days are gradually getting longer due to a phenomenon known as tidal friction. The gravitational interactions between the Earth and the Moon cause this. As ...

In previous magnetic lineation models concerning the spreading of the SCS, no reversal of magnetic lineation was present after the ridge jump. On the other hand, the one-jump model is insufficient to ...

The spreading of the seafloor has slowed, and scientists aren’t sure why The slowdown could mean a drop in greenhouse emissions from volcanoes, which are affected by the seafloor-creating process ...

A new global analysis of the last 19 million years of seafloor spreading rates found they have been slowing down. Geologists want to know why the seafloor is getting sluggish. New oceanic crust forms ...

Scientists can’t be sure of the exact repercussions that a reversal will have — the evidence from previous reversals remains unclear — but they may be serious. For instance, many animals use the Earth ...