Earth's North Pole Is Shifting, Know Why And What Industries It Will Affect

Over the decades, Earth’s magnetic north pole has been slowly drifting across the Arctic, however, the acceleration in this shift has raised questions about what’s driving it and why its motion matters.

A recent study has concluded that artificial water impoundment or the building of dams for water accumulation from 1835 to 2011 is one of the causes that has caused the reorientation of the Earth's rotation axis. Any movement of mass within the Earth or on its surface changes the orientation of the rotation axis relative to the crust, a process termed true polar wander (TPW).

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Constraining TPW due to impoundment and using it to correct the observed 20th century rate of TPW, will help to constrain other physical processes contributing to the signal, including melting of polar ice sheets and glaciers in our warming world, the study claimed.

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“The current behavior of magnetic north is something that we have never observed before,” William Brown, a global geomagnetic field modeler at the British Geological Survey, says in a statement.

For industries reliant on magnetic fields, such as aviation, shipping and navigation, this movement is not a small matter. GPS systems, planes and military equipment track the magnetic field and rely on accurate models of magnetic north to function properly. When the magnetic field shifts, the models must be updated to reflect the changes.

While scientists have been trying to figure out why the shift in magnetic north pole’s speed has changed so dramatically, the artificial impoundment of water in reservoirs has been found out to be one of the reasons. The theory incorporates the feedback into sea level change associated with perturbations in both the magnitude and orientation of the Earth's rotation vector, the study noted.