Why Did Scientists Officially Change the Magnetic North?
This new model updates the location of magnetic north while also providing improved navigation for technologies reliant on Earth's magnetic field.
Updated every five years, scientists have confirmed that the previous model was pretty accurate, but sometimes emergency updates are necessary.
The importance of the world's magnetic field is difficult to understate. On the one hand, this magnetic shield is responsible for life forming on Earth in the first place, as it protects the surface from most of the Sun's harmful UV rays. In a less existential way, the magnetic field is also vital for navigation—just get lost in the backcountry with only a compass to guide you, and you'll quickly understand its importance.
However, the Earth's magnetic north is constantly influenced by the planets roiling iron core, which produces the entire magnetic field. As a result, magnetic north is always changing, and since its discovery in 1831, it has moved roughly 680 miles toward Siberia from its originally documented location. Its speed can also change drastically—from 1999 to 2005, for example, magnetic north shifted from moving only nine miles in a year to 37 miles. However, in the past five years, magnetic north has decelerated from moving 31 miles per year to just 22 miles. It's a pretty chaotic system.
To keep accurate tabs on this ever-changing magnetic north, scientists developed the World Magnetic Model (WMM). Updated every five years, this spherical harmonic model allows navigational systems reliant on Earth's magnetic field to continue operating correctly. The WMM is the standard model used by the U.S., the U.K., and several international organizations, such as NATO. In mid-December of last year, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the British Geological Survey (BGS) released a new version of this model with improved accuracy and better predictions of the next five years of magnetic north behavior.
'The real challenge is, and the reason why we release a model every five years, it doesn't change in a regular way,' William Brown, a geophysicist from BGS who helped create the new model, told Live Science. 'It's not completely predictable. It's a really complicated, chaotic system. Typically, about five years is when the accuracy of the model starts to get to the point where it's not as good as we would like it. So we make a better prediction with five years more information to work from, and just update the prediction going forward.'
These updates will happen in the background on navigational systems from airlines to smartphones, and this new model will likely keep these services up and running without error—emphasis on likely. Because of the unpredictability driven by the planet's geomagnetism, sometimes scientists will release an emergency update to the WMM. In 2019, for example, changes to magnetic north had exceeded the threshold for accurate navigation, so an update was issued (which was only noticeable to those traveling close to the Arctic).
As for the 2020 update, scientists confirmed—by analyzing magnetic north's position—that the previous model was pretty accurate. 'The forecast was very good […]. And so the new model confirmed that we were not very far off,' Arnaud Chulliat, a research scientist from UC-Boulder told CNN.
Scientists (hopefully) won't check back in on magnetic north's true placement until the tail end of 2029.
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