Can anyone point me to a reliable source for the most current (2013/2014) location (coordinates) for Magnetic North? Not extrapolated but actual?
The European Space Agency just completed a three satellite mission named SWARM which yielded a great amount of data abut the state of the planet’s magnetic field. The mission confirmed that the field has weakened by 15% and that magnetic north continues its shift towards Siberia.
However, all Internet reporting on the SWARM mission has maddeningly failed to report the above critical piece of data which is conspicuous by its absence.
Be forewarned that there is a vast amount of disinformation and misinformation out there which is fueling an array of conspiracy theories about an imminent ‘pole shift’.
I am only looking for the “straight dope” on the location which is taking a heck of a lot longer than I thought.
Have you checked around on the USGS website for data you could use? I didn’t look too hard for a cite on the position of magnetic north, but it may be in there somewhere.
I’d imagine, at the very least, the data presented is as unbiased as you could hope for.
Edit: Nevermind, it is obvious you meant the magnetic north pole, which can be measured and located.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think magnetic north is a single point on the geoid (the shape of the Earth), but rather the term for whichever direction your compass points wherever you are – meaning it only indicates the overall direction of your local magnetic field, and a declination adjustment must be applied for your particular location to match it up with geographic north.
So like on this map of the magnetic field, magnetic north would change depending on which zone you are in, and you apply the declination to calculate its difference from true north.
Thanks for the link Nametag but the SWARM link, is in my opinion, unnavigable. In addition, I am very doubtful that the ESA has released the location as it would have been headlined in news accounts if it had.
Yes it is constantly moving and NOAA, NASA, etc. have taken great pains in the past to determine magnetic North’s exact coordinate location. However, the last location made public was in 2009 and that location indicated a dramatic acceleration of the magnetic pole shift. And now we are just to accept the woefully unscientific finding that “magnetic north continues to shift towards Siberia” from an unprecedented, expensive and highly complex, 2014 three-satellite mission to detail the Earth’s magnetic Field?
The location of the magnetic north pole isn’t really a critical piece of information. At least not to the vast majority of people. It doesn’t define the magnetic north as seen by a compass. It is at best a second order indicator of what might be occurring in the geo-dynamo.
The USGS and the like take a lot of care over mapping the entire magnetic field of the earth, and the useful product is the model - created as a spherical harmonic series. That allows you to compute the local inclination and declination angles of the magnetic field wherever you are. Knowledge of the location of the magnetic north is implicitly part of this series.
More to the point, the Swarm satellite survey will not directly measure the location of the magnetic north pole (or the southern pole) rather it provides a set of measurements of the magnetic field at the height of the satellite, from which it is possible to compute an equivalent field on the Earth’s surface. The field is messy. You won’t see a clear single pole location. But the data can be smoothed, and the smoothing can produce a new set of spherical harmonic coefficients. The more coefficients, the less smoothing. The models that are generally used to allow computation of the magnetic field contain enough coefficients to allow useful derivation of the field. With the right amount of smoothing you get to the point where you can usefully solve the system for the poles, and you get single locations for them.
These are not models in the sense that they are some sort of synthetic proxy, rather they are simply a way of conveying the measured data in a compact manner, with a useful amount of smoothing applied.
On the NOAA Wandering of the Geomagnetic poles page, there’s a link to a data set for the dip pole, which runs through 2015. Not sure if that’s what you want, but I doubt that there’s any better data somewhere else.
It should also be noticed that the location of the magnetic pole will depend on just what you mean by that term. You could define the magnetic pole based on the dipole term of the multipole expansion that Francis Vaughan mentioned, which would give you a unique, well-defined location. Or you could define it as the location where the surface magnetic field of the Earth is exactly vertical: There’s guaranteed to be at least one such location, but it won’t necessarily be at the same place as the multipole-defined pole, and there may be multiple such locations.
