End of the world will happen today when magnetic poles flip, say people who are almost certainly incorrect

They’re wrong – but not entirely

Apocalypse now? a scene from the film of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (icon)

Some people might hope that 2016 came to end sooner rather than later. But they probably don’t hope that the entirety of life on Earth comes at the same time.

Unfortunately, self-proclaimed prophets on YouTube claim to have found evidence that’s exactly what’s going to happen, and that 29 July will be our last day here.

The inconveniently timed apocalypse will come because the Earth’s poles are going to swap around – so the north on your compass would show as south – according to the End Times Prophecies video on YouTube that has now been viewed millions of times. And it’s about to happen.

But the Earth’s magnetic poles flip around all the time. And it doesn’t cause a great deal of problems for anyone, apart from the people who make compasses.

The prophecy’s first mistake is assuming that a pole reversal would be out of the ordinary. In fact, we can see from evidence in sediment taken deep from the sea that the pole reversal happens relatively regularly, for such a geological event, and that we’re probably living through one now.

The second mistake is assuming that anything would go seriously wrong if it did. A reversal probably wouldn’t bring with it any of the major events that people claim – things like a flare from the sun, much as that is genuinely something that we should be worrying about.

And Nasa has already addressed the claims - because they are the same ones that were being made back in 2012. Then, they said that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, for a number of reasons.

“The science shows that magnetic pole reversal is – in terms of geologic time scales – a common occurrence that happens gradually over millennia,” Nasa wrote at the end of 2011. “While the conditions that cause polarity reversals are not entirely predictable – the north pole's movement could subtly change direction, for instance – there is nothing in the millions of years of geologic record to suggest that any of the 2012 doomsday scenarios connected to a pole reversal should be taken seriously.

“A reversal might, however, be good business for magnetic compass manufacturers.”