North Magnetic Pole 'sprinting' toward Siberia

[Tom Rankin]

The little diagram in the corner of your map may need to be updated soon...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/science/north-magnetic-pole-model.html

 

[nartreb]

TLDR: the magnetic pole is much closer to the rotational pole than it was when I was born, or when most of my paper maps were printed. Sloppy navigators like me are now even more justified in ignoring the difference between the two poles while weaving around trees, ponds, etc. in places like New Hampshire and Maine. It's even better news for northern Alaska and eastern Siberia, where magnets previously didn't point anywhere near rotational North.

 

[Tom Rankin]

An explanation of why it's moving

https://news.yahoo.com/magnetic-pole-siberia-182700757.html

 

[nartreb]

An explanation of why it's moving

https://news.yahoo.com/magnetic-pole-siberia-182700757.html

I'll TLDR again, to save folks clicking on the Yahoo article that links to the Popular Mechanics article that links via three tracking networks to the article in Nature Geoscience. (But note that somewhere along that path you get a token that lets you read the full paper; if you shortcut straight to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-0570-9.epdf you'll only be able to read the first page unless you have a subscription).

The location of the magnetic pole is influenced by two magnetic anomalies, thought to originate at the core-mantle boundary. There's one under Canada, and one under Siberia. Lately the one under Canada has been getting weaker,* so the net result is for the pole to "move" rapidly toward Siberia.

That's elegant, in that it allows the pole to shift faster than, say, you could move a whole lot of magma from Canada to Siberia.

*why? don't ask me, I'm no geophysicist.