Where is the true north? How the magnetic north pole is drifting away from Canada — and toward Russia
A lesser known feature of the planet Earth’s magnetic field has recently gained a special Canadian connection that is often overlooked in the better known science story about the magnetic north pole drifting away from Canada toward Russia.
The wandering north pole typically gets a round of media attention every five years when there is a new update to the World Magnetic Model, basically a map of the local variations in the planet’s magnetic field that is used for precise calculation in navigation systems. The 2025 version, released a year ago by British and American national scientific organizations, showed that the magnetic north pole is still drifting across the Arctic Ocean toward Russian territory, though at a slower rate than in recent years.
But there is another different wandering north pole that has recently made landfall on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a theoretical “geomagnetic” pole that has more relevance to space science than to compass needles and navigation aids. This one rarely gets noticed in the same way, partly because it has fewer practical applications.
Most news reports about the wandering north magnetic pole tell a story that goes like this.
They will point out that the magnetic north pole is not the same as the geographic North Pole, the point where all the lines of longitude meet and from where there is nowhere to go but south. This geographic North Pole is theoretically the exact same as the place where the Earth’s rotational axis meets the surface, but even that wobbles around a bit because nothing is ever perfect in observational physics.
So, for example, in 2007, when the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve took a dramatic series of timelapse images over 24 hours on the frozen Arctic Ocean, as he slowly walked opposite to the Earth’s rotation so that, in his words, “ I didn’t turn with the world ,” he was at the geographic North Pole, or at least very close to it.
He was relatively far from the magnetic north pole, though, which was then drifting toward him at a few kilometres per year, though he was a lot nearer than he would have been just a few years previously when the magnetic north pole was way further south in Canadian territory. Had he done the same project more recently, in 2020, he would have been about the closest yet on the drifting magnetic pole’s observed trajectory.
Sometimes these drifting magnetic pole stories will have an element of “news you can use,” about how this drift could affect navigation systems at the tourist consumer level, by disrupting the courses of boats and planes.
Sometimes the framing of the story is more fanciful, such as that this will give bragging rights to a militaristic Russia, or somehow mess with Santa Claus’s deliveries.
Often there will be some history of polar exploration. Based on records that go back to the early 19th century, the magnetic north pole meandered around Canada’s Arctic archipelago, drifting as far west as the tip of Victoria Island and as far south as King William Island near Gjoa Haven, but since about the last 100 years it has been moving steadily north. Lately it has accelerated away across the Arctic Ocean toward Siberia, so far north it passed the geographic North Pole and started going south.
But usually the “drifting pole” story is a simple popular science report that describes the grand dynamo of the Earth’s outer core of molten iron and nickel, in which convection currents driven by the intense heat of the solid inner core carry electrical current, which in motion generates a magnetic field.
Because of this physics, somewhere on the Earth’s surface is a place toward which a compass needle will always point, because a compass needle is a magnet that aligns with the Earth’s magnetic field. If you actually go to that special place, the compass needle will point straight down, aligned with the magnetic field that here points vertically toward the Earth’s core. This is the magnetic north pole.
At the magnetic south pole, conversely, a compass needle will point straight up. One quirk of this system is that the Earth’s magnetic north pole is actually a “south” pole according to the conventional physical description of bar magnets, in which opposite poles attract and like poles repel.
And of course, no popular science report about the Earth’s magnetic field would be complete without a mention that the planet’s entire magnetic field has flipped north to south many times over geological history in an unpredictable process that takes thousands of years and leaves evidence for example in places where molten magnetized rock has solidified, leaving its magnetic polarity frozen in time, but opposite to the rest of the Earth.
There might also be mention of the places on Earth, mountain ranges for example, that are notoriously difficult to navigate by compass because the local magnetic fields of the rocks can throw off the needle.
So the magnetic north pole is drifting away from Canada toward Russia. This continued in the year just passed, and the newest trend is that its recent acceleration is slowing down, which might hint at a coming grand scale reversal, though there is no way to predict that.
But there is another aspect to this story that is getting more Canadian by the day, not less.
There is also a geomagnetic north pole, different than either the geographic or the magnetic north poles.
This is more like an idealized theoretical point that takes a wider view of Earth’s magnetic field, and imagines it as a perfect bar magnet, with the local variations averaged out.
The earth is not a perfect bar magnet, of course, so measuring magnetic north on the surface leads to a different “north pole” than modelling it from this wider perspective.
Geomagnetic polarity is basically the wider view of Earth’s magnetic field from space, the view from the perspective of the Sun’s radiation, for example. Some of this radiation is regular sunlight. But it also includes charged particles with high energy from which all life on Earth is protected by the deflecting effect of the planet’s magnetic field.
Sometimes that radiation is deflected in such a way that it does not pass by the Earth, but instead interacts with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere to produce the northern lights. These occur in oval bands around the poles, shaped by the planet’s magnetic field. The geomagnetic north pole, therefore, is the point around which these auroras form in the high atmosphere, unaffected by the local surface drifting of the magnetic north pole.
So, while the magnetic north pole is moving comparatively quickly across the Arctic Ocean, the geomagnetic pole is less actively mobile, and gets less attention. But it does drift, for similarly complex reasons driven by the dynamic physics of the Earth’s interior.
Until recently, it was off the northwest coast of Greenland, moving west. Then about five years ago it came aground on Ellesmere Island , not too far from Hans Island, an uninhabited rock best known as the subject of an unrelated and now settled mild diplomatic feud between Canada and Denmark, which is sovereign over Greenland.
So, in what amounts to the blink of an eye in geological time, Canada has lost one north pole but gained another, a new and different claim to be the true north.
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