Every compass on Earth points at a place that will not hold still. Since a British officer first stood on the north magnetic pole in 1831, it has walked out of Canada, crossed the Arctic Ocean, and kept going — fast enough, once, to force an emergency rewrite of the model your phone uses to find north.
Distance the north magnetic pole has moved since James Clark Ross fixed its position on the Boothia Peninsula in 1831. Most of that ground was covered after 1990. NOAA NCEI / BGS, World Magnetic Model 2025.
Where it is now — north of the New Siberian Islands, closer to Russia than to Canada.
01 · First Fix, 1831
Ross planted a flag and assumed he had found a fixed point. Seventy-three years later Roald Amundsen went back to check — and the pole had shifted. That single discrepancy is the origin of everything on this map.
Sources: WHOI Magnetics Group, The Magnetic North Pole. The 0.7 km/yr figure is arithmetic on the two observed positions, not a published rate.
02 · Speed
For most of the instrumental record the pole crept. Between 1990 and 2005 it accelerated roughly fourfold — and in the last five years it has posted the largest slowdown ever recorded.
The emergency
The World Magnetic Model is normally reissued every five years. By summer 2018 the gap between the 2015 model and the pole's real position had nearly crossed the acceptable navigation-error threshold. NOAA and the British Geological Survey pushed an out-of-cycle release in February 2019 — an unscheduled patch to the planet's compass.
Sources: Livermore et al., Nature Geoscience (2020); NOAA NCEI 2025 WMM Annual Report (published 9 Jan 2026, data through 31 Oct 2025); NOAA NCEI out-of-cycle release notice (2019). Bar lengths scale to a 60 km/yr axis; range bars are hatched.
03 · Declination
Declination is the gap between the north your needle finds and the north on the map. It is not a constant, and near the poles the field goes so horizontal that a compass stops working at all.
Horizontal field intensity, H. Below 2,000 nT the WMM declares a blackout zone — compasses are unreliable. 2,000–6,000 nT is a caution zone. Both rings surround each magnetic pole. Source: NOAA NCEI, WMM accuracy & limitations.
Greenwich, September 2019
The agonic — the line where declination is exactly zero — swept across zero longitude. UK compasses had pointed west of true north for roughly 360 years. The agonic is moving west at about 20 km a year; by around 2040 British compasses should point east of true north.
Source: British Geological Survey, True north and magnetic north cross at Greenwich for the first time in 360 years (2019).
04 · On the ground
Runway numbers are magnetic bearings rounded to ten degrees. When declination drifts far enough, the paint is wrong — so crews go out and change the number on the tarmac.
The closer to the pole, the faster the change. Sources: NOAA NCEI, Airport Runway Names Shift with Earth's Magnetic Field; FAA Order 8260 guidance via NBAA.
Resolution
WMM2025 shipped on 17 December 2024 alongside a first-ever high-resolution twin, WMMHR2025. Both run to the end of 2029.
Source: NGA / NOAA / BGS joint release, December 2024. The model "can be found in virtually every smartphone" (NOAA NCEI, 2026).
05 · Cause
The pole is not a thing that travels. It is where two deep patches of magnetic flux, 2,900 km down at the core–mantle boundary, happen to balance. One of them is losing.
Over the last two decades the pole's position has been set by two large lobes of negative flux on the core–mantle boundary — one under Canada, one under Siberia. Between 1999 and 2019 the Canadian lobe stretched out lengthwise and split into two joined patches. Splitting into smaller scales made it weaker at the surface, because small features fade faster on the way up through the mantle. The Siberian lobe won by default, and the pole slid toward it.
Source: Livermore, Finlay & Bayliff, "Recent north magnetic pole acceleration towards Siberia caused by flux lobe elongation," Nature Geoscience (2020), using ESA Swarm data.
Why it matters
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