system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: what are magnetic poles and why is it significant that the North Pole is moving so quickly?
gpt
If you play around with two magnets you'll see that they have two sides where they are stronger. Depending on how you hold them they either attract each other or repel each other. If you add a third magnet and do some systematic tests you can find out that the magnets have two sides you can distinguish - they are called north (N) and south (S) pole (I'll come to the reason of that). If N of one magnet faces S of the other the two magnets attract each other. If N faces N or S faces S they repel each other.

People played around a bit with magnets. Instead of holding them in your hand you can also put them on a small piece of wood in a bowl of water, for example, then it can rotate easily and it is more sensitive to smaller forces. It turns out that they always align north/south on Earth. The pole facing north was called the N pole, the pole facing south is the S pole. What does that mean? Well, Earth itself is a (weak but huge) magnet. If the N pole of a magnet faces north then it must be attracted by a natural S pole - at the North Pole of Earth. Quite counter-intuitive, but we are now stuck with that definition.

It turns out this is just an approximation, the magnetic poles are not exactly aligned with the poles defined by the rotation of Earth. In addition the magnetic field of Earth changes over time, which means the positions of the poles change, too. We know they can even "flip" - the magnetic poles go from one (rotation) pole to the other. This happened many times in the past. Before such a flip the magnetic field of Earth gets weaker and the magnetic poles wander around quicker (as they are more influenced by smaller disturbances if the field is weaker). The magnetic field protects satellites and (a bit less) the ground from radiation that can be dangerous. Without it many satellites can fail and we might get sightly higher radiation doses at the surface, too.

The quickly wandering magnetic poles plus an observed weakening of the overall field suggest that such a pole reversal might happen in the not so distant future - which means something like 1000 years. It is not guaranteed, however, it is also possible that the field gets stronger again and nothing special happens.