If this holds up, perhaps it will play a role one day in unraveling some mysteries:
The magnetic field is constantly changing. Satellites now provide new means to measure and track its current shifts but the field existed long before the invention of human-made recording devices. To capture the evolution of the field back through geological time scientists analyse the magnetic fields recorded by sediments, lava flows and human-made artefacts. Accurately tracking the signal from Earth’s core field is extremely challenging and so the rates of field change estimated by these types of analysis are still debated.
Now, Dr Chris Davies, associate professor at Leeds and Professor Catherine Constable from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, in California have taken a different approach. They combined computer simulations of the field generation process with a recently published reconstruction of time variations in Earth’s magnetic field spanning the last 100,000 years
Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that changes in the direction of Earth’s magnetic field reached rates that are up to 10 times larger than the fastest currently reported variations of up to one degree per year.
University of Leeds, “Earth’s magnetic field can change 10 times faster than previously thought” at ScienceDaily
Paper. (open access)