Don't know whether this is related to the weather, but I saw this a few weeks back....
Earth’s magnetic pole is on the move, fast. And we don’t know why
Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its life blood — rivers of molten iron — pulse around its core. And this mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras — and keeps us alive.
But, according to the science journal Nature, something strange is going on deep down below.
It’s causing the magnetic North Pole to ‘skitter’ away from Canada, towards Siberia.
“The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move,” Nature reports.
The World Magnetic Model — which governs modern navigation systems — will soon undergo an urgent update.
This model is a vital component of systems ranging from geopositioning systems used to navigate ships through to smartphone trackers and maps.
The current model was expected to be valid until 2020. But the magnetic pole began to shift so quickly, it was realised in 2018 that the model had to be fixed — now.
“They realised that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable (safe) limit for navigational errors,” Nature reports.
Every year, geophysicists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey do a check on how the Earth’s magnetic field is varying.
This is necessary as the liquid iron churning in the Earth’s core does not move in a consistent manner.
“In 2016, for instance, part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean,” Nature reports.
Earth has lines of magnetic force looping from North Pole to South Pole, creating Earth's protective magnetosphere. The straight line coming out of the North and South Poles represents Earth's axis of rotation.
Earth has lines of magnetic force looping from North Pole to South Pole, creating Earth's protective magnetosphere. The straight line coming out of the North and South Poles represents Earth's axis of rotation.Source:Supplied
The movement of the north magnetic pole has been the object of study since 1831. Initially, it was tracked moving into the Arctic Ocean at a rate of about 15km each year. But, since the mid 1990s, it has picked up speed.
“The fact that the pole is going fast makes this region more prone to large errors,” Nature quotes Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA, as saying.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/scie ... c6097be9d