The current World’s Magnetic Model was last updated in 2015. This week an update was due but the partial shutdown of the U.S. government has postponed the announcement. Another revision is planned for 2020. Why suddenly are we getting high-frequency updates on Earth’s magnetic field? Because it is changing at a much more rapid pace than normal.

Why? It may have a lot to do with what is happening deep inside the planet because it is our iron core and the swirling and churning beneath the mantle that generates Earth’s magnetic field.

At a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in Washington, DC, geologists described the rate of change and attributed it to:

1. A geomagnetic pule detected in 2016 beneath South America which caused the magnetic pole to move more rapidly than normal.
2. The motion of the north magnetic pole which in 2018 crossed the International Date Line and is making a beeline for Siberia.

To deal with the navigational challenges that these two phenomena are creating, scientists have to recalibrate navigational software algorithms to adjust for the deviation.

What caused the geomagnetic pulse? Scientists believe it can be traced back to “hydromagnetic” waves from Earth’s core. And the erratic motion of the north magnetic pole may be caused by a high-speed jet of liquid iron that is flowing beneath Canada.

States Phil Livermore, a geomagnetist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, “The location of the north magnetic pole appears to be governed by two large-scale patches of magnetic field, one beneath Canada and one beneath Siberia. The Siberian patch is winning the competition.”

Besides the scientific curiosity of a wandering magnetic pole, what potential harm can it do? You know that electronic street map that displays on the console of your late model car? It uses GPS data which updated by the government regularly. What degrees of difference can make to those maps with significant magnetic pole changes annually could make the difference between being told to turn on to an on-ramp to an interstate highway that isn’t there.

Some interesting facts about the North Magnetic Pole.

1. First located in 1831, over the entire time it has moved 1,102 kilometers.
2. The location of the pole actually wanders as much as 80 kilometers per day in loops so that the plot of the pole is determined by drawing a line to the centre of each daily loop.
3. The current rate of movement has increased from 15 to 55 kilometers per year.

The newly discovered field when measured by the Swarm satellites exerts an electric force of between 2 and 2.5 nano-Teslas. That compares to the major magnetic field at between 25 to 65 micro-Teslas. If you are not familiar with Tesla as a measure of electromagnetic force, one is equivalent to a force of 1 newton traveling through a uniform magnetic field at a speed of 1 meter per second. The nano-Tesla represents a force that is one billionth of a Tesla.

The new field is 20,000 times weaker than the global geomagnetic field that protects us from incoming solar and cosmic radiation. That field is generated by the Earth’s spinning molten iron core. This new field owes its existence to magnetic properties found in the lithosphere, the surface crust of the planet, as well as the magnetic properties inherent in seawater.

When Swarm was first launched in 2013, it was designed to measure how the geomagnetic field is generated, how it behaves, and how and if it is changing. But the satellites soon detected a secondary magnetic field coming from the ocean itself and the seabed floor. States Erwan Thebault, from the University of Nantes, in France, the data from Swarm has given us the ability to “see structures in the crust like never before” including this newly discovered weak magnetic field undetectable until now because the stronger global magnetic field hides it.

What Swarm discovered is a characteristic of saltwater in the ocean to generate an electric current as it passes through the geomagnetic field. This is a field that is extremely difficult to measure but Swarm has done it by studying ocean tides. This tidal magnetic field changes over a 24-hour period.

And as ocean plates get moved along by the mantle conveyor belt and new iron-rich mineral well up to the surface of the seabed, they capture Earth’s magnetic perturbations including the periodic flipping of the geomagnetic field.

The new discovery adds to previously discovered strips of ocean crust that show periodic magnetic reversals providing a snapshot of Earth’s tectonic and geological history over hundreds of millions of years.