Something very, very strange is happening at the very top of the world: due to inexplicable new flows of liquid iron in the core of the planet, the North magnetic pole of the Earth is rapidly moving from Canada towards Siberia, which forces world experts in geomagnetism to urgently revise their maps.
On January 15, the geophysical services of the planet plan to urgently update the so-called World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation - from systems that control ships at sea to Google maps on smartphones.
The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and should have been relevant until at least 2020. However, as it turned out, the position of the poles is changing so quickly that researchers must make a straight line change now.
“The error is constantly increasing,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a staff member at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
According to him, the problem is only partially related to the movement of the pole, since some strange changes began in the depths of the planet itself. The liquid metal seething in the core of the Earth generates most of the magnetic field, which changes as the strength and direction of nuclear deep flows change. Sometimes things go pretty fast.
For example, in 2016, under the north of South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean, the magnetic field simply picked up and moved, which was recorded by all satellites of the European Space Agency. And by the beginning of 2018, the World Magnetic Model had problems at all.
Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh test annually how well the model captures all variations in the Earth's magnetic field. And as they found out, in 2018 the magnetic field was reflected so inaccurately that the model exceeded all acceptable limits for navigation errors.
“It was an interesting situation that we found ourselves in. Everyone is asking the same question: what is happening?”Continues Arno Chulliat. "The pole wanders in unpredictable ways that baffle researchers."
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For decades and even centuries, the World Magnetic Model was relatively constant, but then they began to revise it once in a certain number of years, stopping at an interval of 5 years. And the last updated version was supposed to be relevant until 2020, however, according to the latest data, this model is completely untrue.
And while some of the world's geophysicists are working on errors, trying to build a new magnetic model, another part of scientists is trying to find an answer to the question: why does the magnetic field change so quickly?
To date, the main reason for what is happening is the emergence of a high-speed flow of liquid iron in the core, which flows somewhere in the projection of Canada and is recorded by equipment designed to view the so-called "hydromagnetic" waves coming from the core. As a result, this jet weakens the magnetic field, which, as it were, is pulled over by other streams of iron, raging in the core near Siberia.
"The location of the magnetic north pole appears to be determined by two large-scale magnetic fields, with one center near Canada and the other near Siberia," Phil Livermore, a geomagnetist at the University of Leeds, UK, said at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
According to him, Siberia and Canada are now engaged in a sort of tug-of-war, but Siberia, apparently and most likely, is winning.