Earth's magnetic field dramatically flipped a little more than 40,000 years ago. We can now experience this upheaval as an unnerving clatter interpreted from information collected by the European Space Agency's Swarm satellite mission.

The last such cataclysmic event occurred about 41,000 years ago, leaving a signature in the Laschamps lava flows in France. As the field weakened to only 5 percent of its current strength the reversal process allowed a surpluss of cosmic rays to pass into Earth's atmosphere.

Ice and marine sediment preserve isotopic signatures of this higher-than-normal solar bombardment, with levels of beryllium-10 isotopes doubling during the Laschamps event, according to a study published earlier this year.

These altered atoms are formed when cosmic rays react with our atmosphere, ionizing the air and frying the ozone layer. With global climate change being a potential consequence, it's speculated the extinction of Australia's megafauna as well as changes in human cave use may have been associated with this event.

"Understanding these extreme events is important for their occurrence in the future, space climate predictions, and assessing the effects on the environment and on the Earth system," German Research Center for Geo sciences geophysics Sanja Panovska explained at the time.

It took 250 years for the Las champs reversal to take place and it stayed in the unusual orientation for about 440 years. At most, Earth's magnetic field may have remained at 25 percent of its current strength as the north polarity drifted to the south.

Recent magnetic field anomalies like the weakening over the Atlantic ocean have led to questions about an impending reversal today, but recent research suggests these anomalies are not necessarily connected to flipping events.

The South Atlantic anomaly is, however, exposing satellites in the area to higher levels of radiation.

Since 2013, ESA's Swarm constellation has been measuring magnetic signals from Earth's core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere, and magnetosphere so we can better understand our planet's geomagnetic field and predict its fluctuations.