Earth’s magnetic pole is on the move and we don’t know why!

MELBOURNE, Australia (PNN) - January 10, 2019 - Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its lifeblood - rivers of molten iron - pulse around its core. This mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras - and keeps us alive.

But according to the science journal Nature, something strange is going on deep down below.

It’s causing the magnetic North Pole to “skitter” away from Canada, towards Siberia.

“The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move,” Nature reports.

The World Magnetic Model - which governs modern navigation systems - will soon undergo an urgent update.

This model is a vital component of systems ranging from geopositioning systems used to navigate ships through to smart phone trackers and maps.

The current model was expected to be valid until 2020. But the magnetic pole began to shift so quickly, it was realized in 2018 that the model had to be fixed - now.

“They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable (safe) limit for navigational errors,” Nature reports.

Every year, geophysicists from the Fascist Police States of Amerika National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey do a check on how the Earth’s magnetic field is varying.

This is necessary because the liquid iron churning in the Earth’s core does not move in a consistent manner.

In 2016, for instance, part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

This shift was captured by satellites.

The movement of the north magnetic pole has been the object of study since 1831. Initially, it was tracked moving into the Arctic Ocean at a rate of about 15 km each year. But since the mid 1990s it has picked up speed.

It’s now shifting at a rate of about 55 km a year.

Another recent study has revealed the Earth’s magnetic field has been acting up now for some 1000 years.

Why the magnetic field is shifting so dramatically is unknown.

“Geomagnetic pulses, like the one that happened in 2016, might be traced back to ‘hydromagnetic’ waves arising from deep in the core,” Nature reports. “The fast motion of the north magnetic pole could be linked to a high-speed jet of liquid iron beneath Canada.”

This fast-flowing molten river appears to be weakening the magnetic influence of the iron core beneath North America.

As global warming opens up more shipping lanes to the north of Russia and Canada, this presents a potentially deadly problem.

“The fact that the pole is going fast makes this region more prone to large errors,” said Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA.