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Originally posted by stereologist
reply to post by CUin2013?
Since you realize that you do not understand these concepts I recommend going to the library and getting a book on an introduction to geology and reading it or taking an intro course at a college.
paleomagnetic records show that the dipole polarity of the geomagnetic field has reversed many times in the past, the mean time between reversals being roughly 200,000 years
with individual reversal events taking only a couple thousand years.
These observations argue for a mechanism within the Earth's interior that continually generates the geomagnetic field. It has long been speculated that this mechanism is a convective dynamo operating in the Earth's fluid outer core, which surrounds its solid inner core, both being mainly composed of iron. The solid inner core is roughly the size of the moon but at the temperature of the surface of the sun. The convection in the fluid outer core is thought to be driven by both thermal and compositional buoyancy sources at the inner core boundary that are produced as the Earth slowly cools and iron in the iron-rich fluid alloy solidifies onto the inner core giving off latent heat and the light constituent of the alloy. These buoyancy forces cause fluid to rise and the Coriolis forces, due to the Earth's rotation, cause the fluid flows to be helical. Presumably this fluid motion twists and shears magnetic field, generating new magnetic field to replace that which diffuses away. However, until now, no detailed dynamically self-consistent model existed that demonstrated this could actually work or explained why the geomagnetic field has the intensity it does, has a strongly dipole-dominated structure with a dipole axis nearly aligned with the Earth's rotation axis, has non-dipolar field structure that varies on the time scale of ten to one hundred years and why the field occasionally undergoes dipole reversals.