The Mysteriously Movable North Pole

"It's only going to cause trouble for people who use compasses to navigate around. Even then most of them are used to making corrections. The old navigators would be a bit wise to this."
"It doesn't tell you there's anything weird happening, it's a natural process."
"Decade to decade you get variations as you might in the weather day to day in the atmosphere. If one gets a little stronger, than the others it pulls the magnetic field in that direction."
Louis Moresi, geophysicist, University of Melbourne

"The oldest ocean crust is a couple of hundred million years old — it gets destroyed by plate tectonics so we don't have older crust — but there's hundreds of reversals recorded in that ocean crust."
"There's no correlation with extinctions, but our society today is really heavily dependent on satellites and electronic devices."
"[We really don't know when or how fast a pole flip would or could happen.] People speculate all the time about the field reversing and there's some very nice analyses out there but the fact is we're dealing with incomplete information. We just don't know if it's going to reverse."
Andrew Roberts, paleogeologist, Australian National University

"People get excited when it appears to speed up or slow down, but it's unlikely we're seeing anything that's part of a more substantial swing."
"Even if you switch the Earth's field off, or you visit planets where there is no current field generation, you still see magnetic fields because rocks will carry remnant magnetisation."
"[And there's a rich history of pole shifts and continental drift written into Australia's ancient rocks.] If you look at rocks created at different times in Australia the direction of remnant magnetisation changes." 
"When you go to the regions of Australia that have magnetite deposits you get very strong anomalies [that distort the local magnetic field]."
"If you walked there with a compass, your compass would not give you the direction you would normally expect."
"In Australia, the Earth's field is typically about 50,000 nanoteslas. There's maybe a 15 nanotesla variation through what we call a quiet day."
Clive Foss, senior geoscientist, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation)

North magnetic pole and geomagnetic pole shifts 1900 - 2015

(Supplied: World Data Center for Geogmagnetism/Kyoto University)

 Close to 3,200 kilometres within the Earth lies the liquid iron constituting the core of the Earth, generating its magnetic field, and there a jet has formed and it has been raging like a veritable storm at sea, roiling the molten iron under the Arctic. What is termed a 'geological gust' has shifted the Earth's magnetic North Pole toward Siberia, and it continues to do so, at a rate of an estimated 40 kilometres annually.

This alteration of the pole was reported in the science journal Nature. The new location of the North Pole is meaningful to those attempting to navigate accurately at very high latitudes. The thing of it is, we are no longer as dependent on compasses to determine where the needle points, since the advent of satellites beaming their messages more accurately in a more timely manner.

Usually, it falls to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to publish updates to the World Magnetic Model used by cellphone GPS systems and military navigators to orient themselves. Half of their staff, however, is on furlough until the partial U.S. government shut-down is concluded and all U.S. government offices return to normal operation.

In a fallback of necessity to navigational old models a discrepancy is obvious, one that increases its inaccuracy day by day. Why at this time the geomagnetic commotion is occurring is not yet known, though scientists acknowledge the movement of molten iron in the Earth's interior generates a magnetic field, one that fluctuates in accordance to the behaviour of flows.

Earth's magnetic fields are created by a combination of rotation and convection currents in the molten outer core. (ABC: Julie Ramsden)

That being so, the planet's magnetic poles are known not to align precisely with geographic poles (located at the end points of the Earth's rotational axis), and it is well accepted that the location of the poles can and do change with no warning. Earth's magnetic field has even been known to flip, where the South Pole has located in the Arctic and the North Pole opposite, according to records of ancient magnetism found in million- and billion-year-old rock samples.

A hundred and fifty years ago, James Clark Ross of the British Royal Navy found the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic during his search for the North West passage. During the Cold War an American expedition located the pole 400 kilometres to the northwest. The pole has moved 965 kilometres since 1990, crossing the International Date Line into the Eastern Hemisphere last year, while the South Pole has remained relatively stable.

These shifts require the World Magnetic Model to be updated every five years; the next one had been scheduled to take place in the year 2020.Suddenly strange signals were received through the network of magnetometers and satellites tracking the magnetic field, as the North Pole was accelerating in movement unpredictably to the point where the 2015 version of the World Magnetic Model became oudated and navigation tools reliant on magnetic fields for orientation were drifting off target.

According to research from geophysicist Phil Livermore of University of Leeds, the location of the pole is controlled by two magnetic fields, one under northern Canada and another below Siberia. Dr. Livermore reported the detection of a jet of liquid iron in 2017, appearing to be weakening the Canadian magnetic field. "It's very hard to know what's going on because it's going on 3,000 kilometres beneath our feet. And there's solid rock in the way", observed Dr. Livermore.