Using 11 years of magnetic field measurements from the European Space Agency's Swarm satellite constellation, scientists have discovered that the weak region in Earth's magnetic field over the South Atlantic—known as the South Atlantic Anomaly—has expanded by an area nearly half the size of continental Europe since 2014.
You mean a geomagnetic reversal? These seem to occur at random, so no one knows when or if the next one comes.
I saw a YouTube short that the most recent ones have been around 300k years apart, except that the last one was around 780k years ago, so we’re apparently “due” for one.
There have been periods of millions of years where the field hasn’t reversed, there have also been reversals within a few thousands of years.
The last reversal was 42.000 years ago, but it flipped back within a thousand years, so it doesn’t count as a full reversal.
It’s the fallacy of throwing dice.
Even if there hasn’t been a 6 for 30 throws in a row, your cance of the next dice roll being a 6 is still 1/6.
Gamblers Fallacy. This only applies if the events are independent. A six sided die will always be six sided.
You wouldn’t apply Gambler’s Fallacy to a standard game of Blackjack for example. You don’t have to be a card counter to understand that the probability of a card changes as each one is played.
We don’t know what causes magnetic reversal, and it could be many random or non-random factors that lead up to it or some other external factor. Is it a dice roll, or is there something stacking the deck?
Yeah, that was the word I was looking for.
The times between the magnetic reversal have historically been anywhere between 10k years and 5.45 million years. These numbers are so far apart that the average means basically nothing.
Random just means that we don’t have enough information to make a prediction. Dice aren’t truely random. If we perfectly knew their initial state, the exact state of the table and the state of every air and dust molecule in between, we would be able to 100% predict every dice roll. But we don’t so we can’t and thus we call it random.
Independent also just means that we don’t know the connection. Every dice roll impacts the state of the world and thus impacts the next dice roll. They aren’t truely independent. We just don’t have enough data, understanding and calculation power to see the connection (contrary to e.g. the stacked/counted deck).
In regards to magnetic reversal we know the time between reversals is anything but consistant and predictable, and we have no mechanism by which we can predict when the next one is going to happen. Since we know neither the mechanism nor the factors, they are random to us.
A good example of this concept is the Monty Hall problem (you know, the one with the goats and the car behind doors).
The placement of the goats and the car is random until we open the doors. That doesn’t mean that only when we open the door will whatever is behind the door manifest into a car or a goat, but it means we don’t know what’s behind the doors.
Monty Hall knows what’s behind which door, so to him it’s not random what’s behind the door, and if he was to choose the doors, he’d always find the car.
So according to Bayesian statistics: Until you know something, it’s random and until you know the connection it is independent.