Earth's magnetic field collapsing!

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Ned


I am trying to visualize this, but frankly, I'm struggling. Can you draw a picture of how you can get relatively stable North and South fields of approimately equal intensity with fields in the directed between North and South during short periods of instability that occur during a flip?

I tried to find some decent slide images of a solar flip, unfortunately the internet appears to be lacking anything remotely revealing. I'll look a bit more later.