Viscous remanent magnetization

Okay kiddo, so you know how sometimes when you play with magnets, they stick together? That's because magnets have a special power called magnetism that makes them attract to things that have metal in them.

Well, imagine if those magnets were stuck together for a really long time, like millions of years. They would start to stick together so hard that even if you tried to pull them apart, they would still stay stuck.

This is kind of like what happens with rocks that have tiny magnets in them. Over time, those magnets can get stuck in one direction, kind of like how your hair sticks up when you comb it a certain way. This is called magnetization.

But what's really interesting is that even if you take those rocks out of the ground and bring them to a different place, the magnets in them will still be stuck in that one direction. That's called remanent magnetization.

Now, here's where the word "viscous" comes in. Imagine if you had a stick of gooey slime and you tried to push it around. It wouldn't move very fast because it's thick and sticky, right? Well, sometimes the Earth's magnetic field can act like a gooey slime on those rocks with remanent magnetization. The field is so strong that it slows down the movement of the magnets in the rocks.

So, "viscous remanent magnetization" just means that the magnets in a rock are stuck in one direction because they've been like that for a really long time, and they're not moving very quickly because of the Earth's magnetic field. It's kind of like trying to move through a thick slime.