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       A new study has shown that the North Pole is leaning towards Siberia from its traditional home in the Canadian Arctic as two giant clusters hidden deep underground at the core-mantle boundary engage in a tug of war.
        These spots, areas of negative magnetic current under Canada and Siberia, are involved in a winner-take-all fight. As the drops change shape and strength of the magnetic field, there is a winner; The researchers found that while the water mass under Canada weakened from 1999 to 2019, the water mass under Siberia increased slightly from 1999 to 2019. “Together, these changes have led to the fact that the Arctic has shifted towards Siberia,” the researchers write in the study.
       “We have never seen anything like this before,” Phil Livermore, lead researcher and assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, told Live Science in an email.
        When scientists first discovered the North Pole (where the compass needle points) in 1831, it was in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. The researchers soon realized that the north magnetic pole tended to drift, but usually not very far. Between 1990 and 2005, the rate at which the magnetic poles moved jumped from a historical speed of no more than 9 miles (15 kilometers) per year to 37 miles (60 kilometers) per year, the researchers write in their study.
        In October 2017, the magnetic north pole crossed the international date line in the eastern hemisphere, passing within 242 miles (390 kilometers) of the geographic north pole. Then the north magnetic pole begins to move south. So much has changed that in 2019, geologists were forced to release a year early a new magnetic model of the world, a map that includes everything from airplane navigation to smartphone GPS.
        One can only guess why the Arctic left Canada for Siberia. That was until Livermore and his colleagues realized that drops were to blame.
        The magnetic field is generated by liquid iron rotating in the Earth’s deep outer core. Thus, a change in the mass of the swinging iron changes the position of magnetic north.
        However, the magnetic field is not limited to the core. According to Livermore, the magnetic field lines “bulge” out of the Earth. It turns out that these drops appear where these lines appear. “If you think of magnetic field lines as soft spaghetti, the spots are like clumps of spaghetti sticking out of the Earth,” he said.
        The researchers found that from 1999 to 2019, a slick under Canada stretched from east to west and split into two small connected slicks, likely due to changes in the structure of the main flow between 1970 and 1999. One of the spots was stronger than the other, but overall, the elongation “contributed to the weakening of the Canadian spot on the Earth’s surface,” the researchers wrote in the study.
        In addition, the more intense Canadian spot became closer to the Siberian one due to splitting. This, in turn, strengthened the Siberian spot, the researchers write.
        However, these two blocks are in a delicate balance, so “only minor adjustments to the current configuration can reverse the current trend of the North Pole towards Siberia,” the researchers write in the study. In other words, a push to one point or another can send magnetic north back to Canada.
        Reconstructions of the past magnetic pole movement at the North Pole show that two drops, and sometimes three, have influenced the position of the North Pole over time. Over the past 400 years, the drops have caused the North Pole to linger in northern Canada, researchers say.
        “But over the past 7,000 years, [the North Pole] appears to have moved around the geographic pole erratically without showing a preferred location,” the researchers wrote in the study. According to the model, by 1300 B.C. the pole also shifted towards Siberia.
        It’s hard to say what will happen next. “Our prediction is that the poles will continue to move towards Siberia, but predicting the future is difficult and we cannot be sure,” Livermore said.
       The forecast will be based on “detailed monitoring of the geomagnetic field at the Earth’s surface and in space over the next few years,” the researchers wrote in a study published online May 5 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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        Laura is the editor of Live Science for archeology and life’s little mysteries. She also reports on general sciences, including paleontology. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science, and Spectrum, an autism research website. She has received numerous awards from the Association of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting in a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a BA in English Literature and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in Science Writing from New York University.
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