Earth’s magnetic pole is creeping westward. Unlike our geographic North Pole, which is in a fixed location, Earth’s magnetic north wanders. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1600 km south of true north, in Canada. Yet scientists realised that the location of the magnetic north wasn’t fixed and was drifting at a rate of 15 km a year. Since the 1990s, however, the drift of Earth’s magnetic pole has turned into more of a sprint. Its present speed is around 50-60 km a year and is making a dash towards Siberia at a pace not seen before. Why? Scientists studying the drift of Earth’s magnetic north pole, using data from ESA’s Swarm mission, have pinpointed a change in the circulation pattern of magnetic blobs deep below Earth’s surface. They learned a change in the flow underneath Canada has caused a patch of magnetic field at the edge of Earth’s core, deep within the Earth, to be stretched out. This has weakened the Canadian patch and resulted in the pole shifting towards Siberia.
100 Mind-Blowing Fixed Facts
There’s a restaurant in New York that employs grandmas instead of chefs. The menu at Enoteca Maria is a little unconventional, as half of it is a fixed Italian menu while the other half changes daily. This is because a different grandmother comes in every day with not just a new menu but a completely new cuisine! The owner decided to run his restaurant like this as he had lost all maternal figures in his life and wanted to re-create the feeling of eating in his grandmother’s kitchen.
There are two ways to think of the length of a day on Earth. Though you probably learned that one day on Earth is 24 hours, it takes the planet 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.0916 seconds to rotate on its axis. This is the difference between a solar day and a sidereal day—a solar day is 24 hours, whereas a sidereal day is roughly four minutes shorter. We measure solar time based on the sun’s position in the sky; a sidereal day is measured based on the location of the “fixed” stars. In other words, a sidereal day is the time it takes for a distant star or constellation to appear on the same meridian.