Can pumping groundwater really flip Earth’s poles? An expert explains

Thibault Renard / Getty Images 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…