The north magnetic pole is leaving Canada for Siberia. These 'blobs' may be the reason why.

By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor 2 hours ago



(Image: © Shutterstock)

The north magnetic pole is lurching away from its traditional home in the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia because of a fierce tug-of-war battle being waged by two giant blobs hiding deep underground, at the core–mantle boundary, a new study finds.

These blobs, areas of negative magnetic flow under Canada and Siberia, are in a winners-take-all struggle. Already, as these blobs change shape and magnetic intensity, a victor has emerged; from 1999 to 2019, while the blob beneath Canada weakened, the blob under Siberia slightly intensified, the researchers found. "Together, these changes caused the north magnetic pole to travel towards Siberia," the researchers wrote in the study.

"We've never seen anything like this before," study lead researcher Phil Livermore, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.

When scientists first located the north magnetic pole (the point where your compass needle points) in 1831, it sat in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. Soon, researchers realized that the north magnetic pole tended to wander, but it usually didn't stray far. Then, from 1990 to 2005, the magnetic pole's yearly jaunt jumped from a historic speed of no more than 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to as much as 37 miles (60 km) a year, the researchers wrote in the study.

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