On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet's magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.
The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 - but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now.
In 2016 part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field.
The geometry of Earth's magnetic field magnifies the model's errors in places where the field is changing quickly, such as the North Pole.
The jet seems to be smearing out and weakening the magnetic field beneath Canada, Phil Livermore, a geomagnetist at the University of Leeds, UK, said at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
"The location of the north magnetic pole appears to be governed by two large-scale patches of magnetic field, one beneath Canada and one beneath Siberia," Livermore says.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1
The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 - but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now.
In 2016 part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth's magnetic field.
The geometry of Earth's magnetic field magnifies the model's errors in places where the field is changing quickly, such as the North Pole.
The jet seems to be smearing out and weakening the magnetic field beneath Canada, Phil Livermore, a geomagnetist at the University of Leeds, UK, said at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
"The location of the north magnetic pole appears to be governed by two large-scale patches of magnetic field, one beneath Canada and one beneath Siberia," Livermore says.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00007-1
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