Magnetic signatures hidden inside rocks tell us a lot about Earth's magnetic field and the way continents and tectonic plates have shifted across millennia – but for some periods, the geological record doesn't make much sense.

A fresh analysis of rocks from one of these periods, the Ediacaran (about 630-540 million years ago), aims to solve a long-standing mystery: why is the magnetic record from this time showing wild and chaotic variations in the magnetic field, as if the continents were speeding unusually quickly across the planet's surface?

An international team of researchers led by Yale University has found that this glitch wasn't from the continents acting strangely. It was Earth's magnetic field .

They ran a detailed, layer-by-layer analysis of volcanic rocks from the A

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