Pinned to the Dynamo: Agonic Lines, Excursions and the Body

Pick up a compass anywhere on Earth and the needle swings to line up with something you cannot see: a magnetic field made 2,900 kilometers beneath your feet, in an ocean of molten iron. Every living thing on the surface sits inside that field, all day, every day. Dr. Jack Kruse calls the places where that field holds steady "pinned," and he argues that being pinned to Earth's dynamo matters most when the field starts to wander, as it did during the Laschamps excursion 41,000 years ago, and as some researchers say it is starting to now.

This piece covers what the dynamo is, what agonic lines are and why they move, what happened during the last excursion, and why a group of independent researchers say the human body is wired into all of it. Each claim is labeled with the site's three tiers and attributed to the people who hold it.

Part 1: The Centralized View: the dynamo under your feet

A self-sustaining generator

Earth's main magnetic field comes from the liquid-iron outer core. The US/UK World Magnetic Model report calls this the "core field" and describes it as by far the strongest contribution to the magnetism measured at the surface, with smaller contributions from magnetized rocks in the crust and from electric currents in seawater (NOAA/BGS, WMM2025). Centralized View

Natural Resources Canada explains the physics with the magnetic induction equation. Molten iron conducts electricity, so as it flows through a magnetic field it drags the field lines along with it. Without that motion, the field would decay away with a time constant of about 15,000 years. The outer core spins at different speeds at different depths, which stretches north-south field lines into rings wrapped around the axis (the ω-effect). Rising columns of fluid, twisted by Earth's rotation through the Coriolis force, then loop those rings back into north-south field (the α-effect). The loops merge and regenerate the main field. When generation and decay balance, the field holds steady; when they do not, it grows or weakens, which NRCan describes as "probably the normal situation" (NRCan, Generation of the Earth's magnetic field). Centralized View

Declination and the agonic line

A compass does not point to the geographic North Pole. NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information define magnetic declination as the angle between magnetic north and true north, positive when the needle points east of true north and negative when it points west, and note that it "changes over time and with location" (NOAA NCEI, Magnetic Declination). Lines joining places of equal declination are isogonic lines. The special one where declination is zero, where the compass points straight at true north, is the agonic line. Centralized View

Agonic lines move. Washington University geochemist Robert Criss combined Lewis and Clark's compass and sextant readings from 1803 to 1806 with modern data and found that declination near St. Louis drifted from 7.7° east to 0°. Two hundred years after the expedition, the agonic line ran through St. Louis (Criss 2003). It has kept moving west since. Centralized View

A wandering pole

The north magnetic pole moves too. NOAA's December 2025 State of the Geomagnetic Field report puts the north dip pole's drift at an average of 36 km a year between 2025 and 2026, against 9 km a year for the south dip pole. Between 2015 and 2020 the north pole accelerated so quickly after the 2015 model was released that the model had to be corrected out of cycle, in WMM2015v2. Because of what the report calls "unpredictable non-linear variations in the core field," the World Magnetic Model is rebuilt every five years; the current version, WMM2025, runs to 2030 (NOAA NCEI 2025; NOAA/BGS, WMM2025). Centralized View

The weak spot in the south

ESA's Swarm satellites have measured the field from orbit since 2013. In 2025, Chris Finlay and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark reported that the South Atlantic Anomaly, the region where the field is weakest, grew between 2014 and 2025 by 0.9% of Earth's surface area, an area ESA describes as nearly half the size of continental Europe. The minimum intensity fell from 22,430 to 22,094 nanotesla. Over the same period, the strong-field region over Canada shrank while the one over Siberia grew (Finlay, Kloss & Gillet 2025, reported by ESA). Finlay links the weakening to "reverse flux patches" at the core-mantle boundary, places where "the magnetic field, instead of coming out of the core, goes back into the core" (ESA 2025). Centralized View

Part 2: The Centralized View: the last excursion

A geomagnetic excursion is a short episode when the field weakens sharply and its direction swings far from normal, sometimes reversing briefly before recovering. The best known is the Laschamps excursion, named after lava flows in France's Massif Central. Centralized View

• How weak. Norbert Nowaczyk and colleagues, working on Black Sea sediments, found field intensity during the reversals fell to about 5% of the strong field of 50,000 years earlier, with a fully reversed phase centered at 41,000 years ago lasting about 440 years (Nowaczyk et al. 2012).
• How long. Monika Korte and colleagues built global field models for the period. They found the deep excursion process ran about 5,000 years (43,000 to 38,000 years ago), while the surface expression lasted about 2,000 years. The main north-south (axial dipole) part of the field "reduces to almost zero, but does not reverse," producing excursion behavior "seen globally, but non-uniformly at Earth's surface" (Korte et al. 2019).
• What it did. Alan Cooper, Chris Turney and colleagues used ancient New Zealand kauri trees to build a radiocarbon record across the event. Radiocarbon rose steeply from 42,350 years ago and peaked about 41,800 years ago. They named the weak-field transition the "Adams Event" and concluded that the geomagnetic minima, together with grand solar minima, "caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration and circulation, driving synchronous global climate shifts that caused major environmental changes, extinction events, and transformations in the archaeological record" (Cooper et al. 2021).

Korte's phrase, non-uniform, is the key to the rest of this story. During an excursion the field does not fade evenly. Some regions keep stronger, steadier field for longer, and the lines of declination bend and fold across the map. Centralized View

Part 3: The Middle Ground: bodies inside the field

Magnetite in the brain

In 1992, Joseph Kirschvink and colleagues at Caltech reported that human brain tissue contains magnetite, a strongly magnetic iron oxide, at levels of at least 5 million single-domain crystals per gram in most tissue and over 100 million per gram in the membranes around the brain (Kirschvink et al. 1992). Centralized View that the crystals are there; Middle Ground on what they do

A brain response to Earth-strength fields

In 2019, Connie Wang, Kirschvink and colleagues rotated an Earth-strength magnetic field around volunteers sitting in a shielded chamber. In some participants, specific rotations triggered a repeatable drop in alpha brain waves, a response associated with processing outside stimuli. It appeared only when the vertical part of the field pointed downward, as it does in the Northern Hemisphere, and participants reported that they could not tell when the field had changed (Wang et al. 2019). Middle Ground

Clocks without the field

Rütger Wever ran human circadian experiments in an underground bunker at Andechs, Germany, where one of two rooms was shielded from natural magnetic and electric fields. Across 82 subjects, the free-running daily rhythm was shorter in the unshielded room, and true internal desynchronization, the body's rhythms drifting apart from one another, showed up only in the shielded room. Wever concluded that "natural electromagnetic fields are proved to be effective on human beings for the first time" (Wever, reported in PubMed 11826883). Middle Ground

The mitochondria and magnetism article covers the lab side of this: radical-pair chemistry, cryptochrome, and mouse studies in which removing Earth's field raised reactive oxygen species. Middle Ground

Part 4: The Decentralized View: pinned to the dynamo

Dr. Jack Kruse: why "pinned" matters

Dr. Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon turned quantum-biology writer, builds his health model on the idea that magnetism comes first. In his conversation with Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton, he put it this way: "magnetism is the father of the bioelectric currents in the body. So if the magnetism is [not] right, you can't get the benefit of the sun." Decentralized View

In that interview, he says the best places to live are found by crossing latitude, which sets the sunlight, with agonic and isogonic lines, which he links to magnetism, the way a ship's captain cross-references a chart. Because the field moves, he says, those lines move too, and he described the agonic line with a workout image: "like when you're doing a workout and you have a rope and you hit the rope and the rope does the oscillation wave, that's the agonic line. So while it may be good for you right here and right now, and it was in 2026, it may not be true in 2027. That doesn't happen when the magnetic field stays pinned." He names El Salvador, where he lives, as "the number one place" on his list. He also argues direction matters: "The magnetic field there is vertical, which is not good for us. We want horizontal." Decentralized View

What the twisting does

In a 2026 X thread, Kruse describes what he sees happening as the field weakens. When the geodynamo runs at full strength, he writes, its ordered flux lines act like "a deep containment valve" at the core-mantle boundary. During "an accelerating magnetic decline or a full-scale excursion (like the modern 10% drop since 1968 or the ancient Laschamps event ~42,000 years ago)," that containment collapses: "The agonic and isogonic lines twist, dropping local magnetic energy density." He argues that "primary water, natural gas, and oil all come from the core mantle boundary," and that the field's variable weakness is part of what lets them rise. Decentralized View

He writes that the twisting does not stop at the planet. "When a planet's geodynamo weakens or the poles migrate rapidly, the lines don't just disappear—they tilt, twist, and skew, creating severe regional spatial shear (declination anomalies)." Inside the body, he says, the same physics plays out in the mitochondria: under artificial blue light and non-native EMFs, "your cristae lose their magnetic pinning," the spin filter in the membrane breaks down, and the respiratory chain is pushed into the Marcus inverted region. Decentralized View

To Kruse, a pinned place is one where local geology holds the field flat and steady while the global field drifts. He argues that El Salvador sits near the magnetic equator, where the field already runs roughly parallel to the ground; that the country's volcanic chain runs east-west; and that deep, slowly cooled magma bodies hold stable magnetite that acts as "a hidden, high-Q permanent magnetic anchor." The result, he writes, is that the geology "forces the local magnetic vectors to stay pinned flat against the crust." In his own words: "I can stay put, and build my Ark, because the physics of the land has my back." Decentralized View

Ben Davidson: the excursion is already starting

Ben Davidson (@SunWeatherMan), founder of Suspicious0bservers, argues that the current weakening is the start of the next excursion. In a 2021 essay he wrote that "evidence suggests that earth's magnetic field is entering excursion again now," and that excursions come as "fast-flips" on a cycle of about 12,000 years. He lists the biological stakes as more UV and cosmic radiation, disrupted animal navigation, and what he calls "bio-electromagnetic coupling." He links solar storms and cosmic rays to cardiac events, strokes, migraines and autoimmune flares, and writes that during an excursion "there is unquestionably more exposure to those stimuli... which means that the adverse reactions will be stronger and more numerous." Decentralized View

The Ethical Skeptic and the core

The Ethical Skeptic, author of the ECDO hypothesis, puts the Laschamps excursion at the center of his Earth-change model, calling it "the poster child" for the inquiry in a recent exchange with @stephXskystory. He argues that a geomagnetically expressed force at the core-mantle boundary could drive a rapid rotation of Earth's crust and mantle. Independent researchers such as @MethuselasMuse are building their own geodynamo simulations of the South Atlantic Anomaly, an effort he welcomed: "Modelling 'plaque on the geodynamo': gosh that is a beautiful simulation." Decentralized View

What the featured voices do about it

These are the practices the featured people describe, each within their own framework. None of it is advice from this site.

• Know your field. NOAA's free declination calculator gives the declination, inclination and field strength for any address, so you can see where you sit relative to the agonic line, and Kruse tells people to look at both latitude and magnetism before choosing where to live.
• Get on the ground. Grounding, or "earthing," means bare skin on soil, sand or water. Gaétan Chevalier and colleagues reviewed small studies reporting changes in sleep, pain and blood measures when people were grounded (Chevalier et al. 2012). Kruse pairs grounding with sunlight as the base of his protocol.
• Sun first. Kruse's rule is morning and midday sun on bare skin and eyes. See the circadian living map and light and the microbiome.
• Protect the rhythm. Wever's bunker work is why circadian writers keep natural signals around the body: daylight, darkness at night, and less artificial light and EMF after sunset. See resetting your rhythm.
• Cold and water. Kruse adds cold exposure and time in natural water, especially the ocean.
• Watch the field, together. Davidson, The Ethical Skeptic and the pole-shift community track Swarm data, pole drift and space weather in public, and argue that a prepared community is the best response to an excursion. See The Signal and geomagnetic jerks.

Evidence map

This article presents viewpoints, attributed to their sources. It is not medical advice.

Sources

Viewpoint sources:

• Dr. Jack Kruse, X thread on the geodynamo, twisting agonic lines and El Salvador's magnetic pin (Thread Reader)
• Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Jack Kruse (transcript)
• Ben Davidson, "Geomagnetic Extinction: A Paramount Science Disagreement" (Principia Scientific, 2021)
• The Ethical Skeptic, reply on Laschamps and ECDO (X)
• @MethuselasMuse, "plaque on the geodynamo" simulation (X)

Research and data:

• NOAA NCEI. Magnetic Declination (Variation). ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/declination.shtml
• NOAA NCEI & British Geological Survey (2025). The US/UK World Magnetic Model for 2025–2030. Report (PDF)
• NOAA NCEI (2025). December 2025 State of the Geomagnetic Field. Report (PDF)
• Natural Resources Canada. Generation of the Earth's magnetic field: in depth. geomag.nrcan.gc.ca
• Criss, R. E. (2003). Mid-continental magnetic declination: a 200-year record starting with Lewis and Clark. GSA Today 13(10), 4–10. PDF
• ESA (2025). Swarm reveals growing weak spot in Earth's magnetic field. esa.int
• Nowaczyk, N. R. et al. (2012). Dynamics of the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion from Black Sea sediments. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 351–352, 54–69. sciencedirect.com
• Korte, M., Brown, M. C., Panovska, S. & Wardinski, I. (2019). Robust characteristics of the Laschamp and Mono Lake geomagnetic excursions. Frontiers in Earth Science 7:86. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00086
• Cooper, A. et al. (2021). A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago. Science 371, 811–818. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb8677
• Kirschvink, J. L., Kobayashi-Kirschvink, A. & Woodford, B. J. (1992). Magnetite biomineralization in the human brain. PNAS 89, 7683–7687. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.89.16.7683
• Wang, C. X. et al. (2019). Transduction of the geomagnetic field as evidenced from alpha-band activity in the human brain. eNeuro 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0483-18.2019
• Wever, R. The effects of electric fields on circadian rhythmicity in men. PubMed 11826883
• Chevalier, G. et al. (2012). Earthing: health implications of reconnecting the human body to the Earth's surface electrons. Journal of Environmental and Public Health 2012:291541. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/291541

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