Normally the World Magnetic Model is updated every 5 years, but the North Magnetic Pole is changing position so fast, regular updates are now required.
Earth’s magnetic field is changing so quickly that researchers have been forced to update to the World Magnetic Model ahead of schedule. Developed by NOAA and the British Geological Survey, the model is widely used for precision navigation of devices ranging from nuclear submarines to the common smartphone. Your own phone may be affected.
Source: http://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/poles/polesexp.html
Pick up your cell phone and look at it. That rectangular marvel of modern technology contains thousands of lines of code. Among them is the World Magnetic Model (WMM)–a program that helps your phone navigate. And it’s in a bit of trouble. Researchers have announced that the WMM needs an emergency update because Earth’s magnetic field is changing.
Savvy backcountry hikers have long known that compass needles don’t really point north. The magnetic north pole is displaced hundreds of miles from the true north pole and, to make matters worse, it wanders unpredictably from year to year. To find true north in the continental USA, you have to correct compass directions by as much as 20 degrees using a special “declination table.”
The World Magnetic Model is a computer program that makes this correction for you. It improves the navigation of devices ranging from nuclear submarines to common smartphones.
“The WMM is the standard magnetic model used for navigation by organizations such as NATO, the Ministry of Defence, and the US Department of Defense, and also by smartphone operating systems such as Android and iOS,” explains Will Brown of the British Geological Survey’s Geomagnetism Team, which produces the model in collaboration with NOAA of the USA.
Full story here on spaceweather.com
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Not shown on here, but the magnetic north moved south during and just before the LIA until around the 19th century. While the magnetic north has moved north the recent modern climate emerged.
Moved north during recent modern warming and moved south during cooling leading to the Little Ice Age. (coldest period in last 10,000 years)
Coincidence the planet generally cools when magnetic north moves south and warms when magnetic north moves north?
Maybe/maybe not
If correct the magnetic north will move south again about from now, so does this mean future global cooling to follow?
Published: November 15, 2018
New perspectives in the study of the Earth’s magnetic field and climate connection: The use of transfer entropy
The new results seem to support this hypothesis, with more information transferred from the SAA to the GSL time series, with about 90% of confidence level. This result provides new clues on the existence of a link between the geomagnetic field and the Earth’s climate in the past and on the physical mechanism involved because, thanks to the application of the transfer entropy, we have determined that the sense of the connection seems to go from the system that produces geomagnetic field to the climate system. Of course, the connection does not mean that the geomagnetic field is fully responsible for the climate changes, rather that it is an important driving component to the variations of the climate.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207270
As demonstrated by vukcevic at numerous occasions.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/CT4-GMF.htm
Correlation is negative so their statement kind makes sense, but I’m not well versed in entropy matter s
Thanks for links.
Vukcevic,
Are you expecting μT to increase when magnetic north moves south again?
As Canadian ‘pole’ is diminishing in strength ‘magnetic dip pole, will be getting closer to the Siberian’pole’ whose strength is gradually increasing so field at dip pole is expected to increase too.
The magnetic pole shift may be a symptom of post-glacial rebound making changes to Earth’s gravity. As glaciers melt, the distribution of mass around the Earth changes.
These changes in gravity change the shape of the geoid, which may affect ocean currents. And ocean currents affect the climate.
And if it flips over, for a while there may be no pole to point the compass to. Makes country backpacking difficult.
We are days (hours ?) before Mrs. Occasio-Cortez and Mr Al Gore announce on a concerned press conference that we’re doomed due to global warming influence on magnetic north pole.
So unless you have extra disposable cash, no need to vote for new taxes.
No fears. It has been always so. Except that now we can update things much faster than adding new sheets of paper to binders.
There are more than one magnetic north poles, magnetism is a vector thing, several magneto anomalous zones add their effects. The resultant distribution of field gives what is known as magnetic pole.
Second, all big things in the air use inertial coupled to satellite navigation systems. Which are totally immune to magnetic variations.
Things become a concern for general “compass” aviation and situations where none of the vastly redundant navigation systems is serviceable.
Canadian media are free to panic as Canada has creative mixtures of true north and magnetic north rules.
As far as I know on the old continent only France has renamed few minor airport runaways to correct for their magnetic heading. Quite a decade ago.
Summary: – Business as usual, nothing new under the sun.
Shifting North magnetic pole? Perhaps that explains Occasional-Cortex’s behavior!
She must be bi-polar.
Oh, I think there are multiple axis of stupid involved there.
If you should get lost, the basics are still the fact that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Look at the shadows and its easy to know approx. where the North and South is. T hen if you are still lost, find water and follow its flow, it will finally bring you to people.
MJ E
[The mods do NOT recommend these practices be followed across most of northern Canada, Alaska, Russia, Mongolia, Australia, or the jungles of the Amazon, Congo, Mississippi, or Central FL. They do work near most major cities, and on both equinox days. .mod]
The basics still work! My wife is always amazed by how I can navigate around cities I have never been in before, and I always say”they are called maps” and I only need to check one for a few minutes to be able to operate in pretty much any place. Erratically placed one-way streets are the only real problem I usually have.
This is such obviously misguided advice.
Anyone who has ever seen a map knows that east and west are at 90 degrees from north.
Clearly, as the north moves, as any map will show you, then east and west are also moving.
If this keeps up, the sun will soon be rising and setting in the north and south!
Such a lack of edukation today. I really feel so lost nowadays.
Obviously the Russians are behind this in order to make northern Siberia warmer.
Quite a seasonal difference in the sunrise position where I live. Best bet here would be to check out a TV dish on a roof, that points south.
Or you could just knock on the door and ask where you are! Unless it is a bad neighborhood, that is.
OK, all sarc aside, I was taught about the difference between true North and magnetic North in basic orienteering in scouts, got a much more detailed course in US Army Basic then even more detail in USA Field Artillery Forward Observer and Fire Direction courses. Studying the continuing shift of magnetic pole has always been interesting. That it moved faster in the past and now appears to be picking up pace again makes one wonder, and I never realized the geomag pole did that bobble in early 1900s, always thought it tracked much the same just on a much shorter line. Just how deep into the Earth’s crust does the effect occur? And how deep down is the cause of this variation? Or is this caused by interactions between Sol and other planetary bodies on Earth’s magnetosphere? Questions upon questions.
“The magnetic pole is on the move!”
[looks over shoulder, shrugs]
“The magnetic pole’s movement is accelerating rapidly!!”
[glances at map, notes years of fixes, rolls eyes]
“Your own phone may be affected!”
[spins phone on table, puts back in pocket, shrugs]
“Polarization of molten ferrous rock will be affected!”
[screams in terror]
Can any of you savants please elucidate the difference between the “Magnetic Pole” and the “Geomagnetic Pole”?
The observation that the intervals between magnetic pole reversals are lengthy (“Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal.”) is based on sea floor spreading. At the very slow rate of spreading: “As a general rule, fast ridges have spreading (opening) rates of more than 9 cm/year. Intermediate ridges have a spreading rate of 5–9 cm/year while slow spreading ridges have a rate less than 5 cm/year.” a reversal period of less than 1000 years means that the width of a sea floor band would probably be less than 9 m, and at a maximum guess would be no more than 15 m. The chances of being able to detect such a band would be, I imagine, rather low, and if detected would likely be attributed to hiccough in the equipment.
However, vases can be dated, and the attitude in which they are fired can be determined by the direction of flow of the glaze. There are reports that there was a reversal about 1500 BC and another about 750 BC. These would be undetectable by undersea equipment.
First quote from: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-poleReversal.html
Second quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafloor_spreading
Cannot give the reference to the pottery glaze indicating recent reversals as this is forbidden on this site.
It looks like it’s been getting closer to the actual north pole…so what’s the problem?
The South Magnetic Pole is also on the move ,Some predict the two Poles will meet in the Indian Ocean -where they’ll have a Big POW WOW – ie A pole reversal party -Everyone is invited , and though attendance is not mandatory – it is unavoidable . Cheers!!
“That rectangular marvel of modern technology contains thousands of lines of code”
That’s got to be off by a couple orders of magnitude. A simple app would have thousands of lines of code. The OS of any given phone probably has a million or more.
… except that the “lines of code” are source code and not the object code which is in the phone.
There will a fair bit of python and java script which could be interpreted code, though even python often gets pre-interpreted and become byte code not “lines of code”.
Thought journo who wrote that clearly understands little of the subject someone could probably find him “thousands of lines of code” if there was bet on.
The object code still started out as lines of code, so that would be included.
As far as I know, the GEOmagnetic pole is the one the compasses point to. Not the magnetic pole. The GEOmagnetic pole is hardly changing at all. The GEOmagnetic pole is the one that the compass needle dips and goes vertical at, if you are standing there. IGNORE the magnetic pole. That is just a mathematical artifact.
How is the magnetic pole a mathematical artifact? you might ask. THAT pole has both poles 180° opposite – because they MAKE it do that, so that the axis goes through the center of the Earth. The GEOmagnetic pole – which is way over by Ellesemere Island does NOT have an axis going through the center of the Earth. The S Pole wander is independent of the center of the Earth. Same with the N Pole. Both wander on their own. They are WAY independent of each other and wander each on its own. THAT tells you that they are naturally occurring, not creations of math.
The GEOmagnetic N Pole is the one the birds navigate by – AND MAN.
Steve Garcia, you have it backwards — the geomagnetic pole is the math artifact, not the magnetic pole (as E.S. properly says below).
BTW, look at that map of magnetic north pole. Do you see anything erratic about it? It is a damned near straight line, since at least 1980 that line has been straight. And yet the article asserts that it is doing something erratic. I call b.s. If it is wandering and follows a straight line, that is not erratic. That is predictable.
Submarines use inertial guidance systems developed by Lee Attwood at North American Aviation in the 50’s
Steve Garcia
The pole the compasses point is not the GEOmagnetic pole, it is the magnetic pole.
In Canada Domestic Airspace is divided into two areas: the Northern Domestic Airspace and the Southern Domestic Airspace. In the Northern Domestic Airspace all runways are in true north and you navigate in true. A map of the area is shown:
http://www.aerotransport.com/reference/CPHA_c7.pdf
The north magnetic pole drifted south from 1600 to 1831 when it was measure for the first time. Maybe the pole will start coming south again.
http://geo.phys.uit.no/articl/roadto.html
I don’t know, but I’ll bet the subs have triple redundancy navigation systems.
With the pole moving North and away from the USA this means it will be even less likely to see the Aurora borealis in the continental us. It will be more frequent in Russia.
YES!!! That clearly shows Putin’s Running Dog Bourgeoisie Stooge Donald Trump caused it!!!!!!!!(once again, do I actually have to put a sarc tag on this stuff?)
Would it be possible to have a bar graph showing the distance moved each 5 year period? The map is a flattening of a sphere, so I can’t tell how much the distortion is.
So, when are we going to have the Magnetic Pole Flip?
(and what effect would it have on Life As We Know It?)
So what is happening at the back end? Is the South end of the magnetic field symmetrically opposite from the North?
Are the ends non-symmetric?
Is the South end moving also.
Does this mean a pole shift is closer than we think?
Peaking of pole shifts-How long does one take to complete?
Is there a similar shift in the Earth’s core? A fast shift might not be pleasant.
When I published this
Climate Change And The Earth’s Magnetic Poles, A Possible Connection.
Available on my website, I was told in no uncertain terms that climate change was causing the problem, not the other way round.
I couldn’t confirm the reasons but suspected it was something to do with the way the Earth’s magnetic field channeled cosmic rays hitting us.