Earth's magnetic north pole is moving too fast for experts to keep up. Now scientists might know why.
- Earth's magnetic north pole keeps moving.
- In the past few years, it has moved so much that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an early update to its World Magnetic Model, which informs everything from GPS apps to the US Department of Defense's navigation systems.
- Scientists aren't certain why the planet's magnetic field, which protects us from deadly solar winds, keeps shifting, but one theory is that geomagnetic pulses in the planet's core throw the field into whack.
- In a new study, researchers modeled the source and timing of those sudden geomagnetic jerks.
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In the Hollywood blockbuster "The Core," the planet's core suddenly stops rotating, causing Earth's magnetic field to collapse. Then bursts of deadly microwaves cook the Colosseum and melt the Golden Gate Bridge.
While "nearly everything in the movie is wrong," according to Justin Revenaugh, a seismologist from the University of Minnesota, it is true that Earth's magnetic field shields the planet from deadly and destructive solar radiation. Without it, solar winds could strip Earth of its oceans and atmosphere.
But the planet's magnetic field isn't static.
The Earth's north magnetic pole (which is not the same as geographic north) has led scientists on something of a goose chase over the past century. Each year, it moves north by an average of about 30 miles.
That movement made the World Magnetic Model - which tracks the field and informs compasses, smartphone GPS, and navigation systems on planes and ships - inaccurate. Since the next planned update of the WMM wasn't until 2020, the US military requested an unprecedented early update to account for magnetic north's accelerated gambol.
Now authors of a new study have gained insight into why magnetic north might be moving - and are learning how to predict these shifts.
Tracking movement in the Earth's core
Earth's magnetic field exists thanks to swirling liquid nickel and iron in the planet's outer core some 1,800 miles beneath the surface. Anc****d by the north and south magnetic poles (which tend to shift around and even reverse every million years or so), the field waxes and wanes in strength, undulating based on what's going on in the core.
Periodic and sometimes random changes in the distribution of that turbulent liquid metal can cause idiosyncrasies in the magnetic field. If you imagine the magnetic field as a series of rubber bands that thread through the magnetic poles and the Earth's core, then changes in the core essentially tug on different rubber bands in various places.
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