Scientists have measured the location of the Magnetic North Pole since James Clark Ross first identified it in Canada’s Nunavut territory in 1831. The pole has moved several kilometres annually, but in recent decades, it has been racing towards Siberia at an unprecedented rate. A team of researchers from the UK and Denmark say they’ve uncovered the cause of this rapid shift: Two writhing lobes of magnetic force are duking it out near Earth’s core.
Our planet’s protective magnetic field, which keeps deadly cosmic rays at bay and serves to orientate our navigation systems, is generated in Earth’s outer core, more than 2 900 km below the crust. ‘You’ve got these sorts of swirling hot masses of molten iron, bubbling and moving around,’ says Phil Livermore, PhD, a professor of geomagnetism at the University of Leeds. These molten blobs of iron generate an electrical current, which in turn creates a magnetic field. In regions on Earth’s outer core where magnetic force is strongest, the magnetic field pokes out. ‘That’s what we call a flux lobe,’ Livermore says. These shifting lobes of magnetic force determine the location of the planet’s magnetic poles through a magnetic tug of war.
This story is from the Popular Mechanics July/Augusy 2021 edition of Popular Mechanics South Africa.
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This story is from the Popular Mechanics July/Augusy 2021 edition of Popular Mechanics South Africa.
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