Every five years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British Geological Survey (BGS) jointly update the World Magnetic Model (WMM). The newest version shows that the Magnetic North Pole continues to shift away from Canada toward Siberia, but it has been slowing down.
The World Magnetic Model
The WMM is a map of the Earth’s magnetic field. The movement of the Magnetic North Pole is so significant because all navigation that relied on magnetic field data must be updated regularly.
“Imagine someone planning to travel by sleigh from a chimneytop in South Africa to a snow-covered roof in the UK, a journey of around 8,500 km,” commented the BGS. “Using the previous WMM and setting off just one degree off-course, he would end up approximately 150km from where he should.”
The reason behind the shifting North Pole is molten iron and nickel movement in the planet’s outer core. Over the last 20 years, the iron and nickel have been flowing away from the magnetic lobe that sits underneath Canada and moving toward the Siberian lobe. This has pulled the Magnetic North Pole in that direction.
The WMM 2025 model. Image: NOAA NCEI
A sudden deceleration
“The current behavior of magnetic north is something we have never observed before,” William Brown of the BGS said in a statement. “Magnetic north has been moving slowly around Canada since the 1500s, but in the past 20 years, it accelerated towards Siberia, increasing in speed every year until about five years ago. Then it suddenly decelerated from 50 to 35km per year, which is the biggest deceleration we’ve ever seen.”
The new WMM has 10 times better spatial resolution than previous versions.
Magnetic North Pole locations from 1590 to 2030. Image: BGS, UKRI, and Wessel, P., and W. H. F. Smith (1996)
A moving target
The Magnetic North Pole is completely different from the Geographic North Pole. The Geographic Pole is a fixed point on the surface of the Earth. We have known that the Earth has a magnetic field and magnetic poles since the 1600s. However, it took over 200 years to discover the exact position of the Magnetic North Pole.
During John Ross’s 1831 Arctic expedition, James Clark Ross (his nephew) led the team that pinpointed the Magnetic North Pole on the west coast of the Boothia Peninsula. Over time, it became clear that its position was not fixed.
When modern arctic treks became more popular in the 1980s, the Magnetic North Pole was located a convenient 600km north of Resolute, in Canada’s Nunavut. For some time, it served as a good test run for those hoping to reach the Geographic North Pole the following year.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, after the Magnetic North Pole had moved to a much less accessible location on the Arctic Ocean, organizers in the UK created a race in which teams skied from Resolute to the former site of the Magnetic North Pole. Although they billed it as a race to the Magnetic Pole, the Pole had already abandoned the Canadian islands and was speeding toward Russia. No one has skied to the actual site of the Magnetic North Pole since those training expeditions in the 1980s.
