Is the Earth losing its magnetic field protection?

An open question in science is whether the Earth is starting a magnetic shift of the poles. If so, we may have hundreds of years during the transition where we are "shields down", since this field protects us from sun storms and cosmic rays.

On the average, around every 250,000 years the Earth undergoes a magnetic field reversal, i.e., the poles are reversed. The evidence from analyzing the iron record in the baking of clay pots from prehistory to modern times, suggests we are long overdue for a shift, since the last magnetic shift apparently happened around 750,000 years ago. The Earth's tear-drop shaped bubble of magnetic field protection extends about 36,000 miles into space. The shift could take hundreds of years to complete, and without our magnetic shield we are vulnerable to the devastating effects of solar winds, sun storms and cosmic rays, the worst kind of alien invasion from outer space. Much research is now taking place about this phenomenon and many researchers think it's probable a magnetic shift is now underway. Auroras are the fingerprints of changed particles from space interacting with the atmosphere as they flow into the north or south poles. Should our "shields go down", as they predictably will in the middle of a shift, we would have the pleasure of seeing auroras all over the planet; however, this aesthetic experience would be more than canceled out by being vulnerable to floods of radiation. A NOVA program called Magnetic Storm treated this scenario, suggesting we may well already be in the transition phase with growing areas of magnetic anomaly. A further concern was that around 10% of our shielding was already lost. At the present rate, the Earth's magnetic field could be gone in a few centuries and the consequences of this would not only fry much our electronics, but expose the Earth to cancerous radiation. In short, even though the experts aren't certain sure how long the transition period would take, it could well be few hundred years and we would then be subject to the same forces that "blew away" the atmosphere of Mars. However, the problem with Mars is that it lost its magnetic shield billions of years ago when the molten iron core simply cooled to the point where no magnetic field could be generated. Fortunately, this is not the Earth's problem since our core is alive and well and no one is concerned that the transition period would go on indefinitely. Indeed, there's still a possibility that all this is a false alarm and things will return to normal without a shift . . . .at least for now. However, the probability is otherwise and we may well be approaching an extended period of "shields down". What will then happen to the biosphere of the Earth is speculative, albeit unnerving. Naturally our magnetic field is functionally related to the core dynamics of the Earth and is awesome evidence that Faraday and Maxwell knew what they were talking about with electromagnetism.