> One side effect of the magnetic field shift is slight but primarily beneficial: It can help shield Earth from galactic cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles that travel at near light speed and can damage spacecraft and harm orbiting astronauts who are outside Earth's protective atmosphere. Buried three sentences from the end of the article, after a wall of ads and filler (I'm impatient).
It appears the magnetic poles are in continuous rotation [1], that sometimes aligns to the rotational poles and sometimes doesn't, with a "flip" event being the binary classification from the slow and smooth traversal over the equator. I feel silly, but I always assumed it was from some more fairly sharp step in the rate of change!