Last week a government minister in the Northern Territory, spruiking a plan to make Darwin “the datacentre 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 palaeomagnetist – 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.

The first problem is that there are two very different “north poles”.

The geographic North Pole is the one on every map, and it is the spot where Earth’s spin axis meets the surface. This pole drifts by about 10cm a year, as ice, water and movements of Earth’s crust shift mass around the planet.

The magnetic north pole is something else entirely: the spot where the magnetic field points straight down. It slowly wanders around the geographic pole, a restlessness we call secular variation.

The unflippable geographic pole

Can the geographic pole flip? In practice, no.

A spinning Earth behaves like a gyroscope – a spinning........

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