Recently, a government minister in the Northern Territory, pitching a plan to make Darwin “the data center capital of the globe,” suggested it might be a good idea to pump out groundwater to keep Earth’s spin steady. If we don’t, she said, we might risk “flipping the poles again.”
Is she right? And what’s she even talking about?
As a paleomagnetist—someone who studies Earth’s magnetic field and reads ancient rocks to understand how it was in the past—let me walk you through what it means for Earth’s poles to flip, what groundwater has to do with it, and why there is absolutely nothing to worry about.
Find out more
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-groundwater-flip-earth-poles-expert.html
