Your compass doesn't point to the North Pole. It points to the north magnetic pole, and that spot has been drifting out of Arctic Canada, across the date line and toward Russia since it was first found in 1831.
For a century it moved a few kilometres a year. Then in the 1990s it sped up to 50–60 km a year.
Livermore et al. (2020) put the historic speed at 0–15 km/yr and the recent speed at 50–60 km/yr. Geological Survey of Canada fixes give an average of 52 km/yr for 2001–07. By 2025 NOAA measured 36 km/yr.
Line: average speed between published fixes, computed by us as straight-line distance divided by years. The real path wandered, so true speeds were at least this high. Strip: speeds as reported in the cited sources.
Between 2000 and 2010 the pole moved about as far as it had in the 43 years from 1947 to 1990.
Over the whole 20th century it travelled about 1,100 km (Geological Survey of Canada). Ross's 1831 fix and Amundsen's 1904 fix were only about 67 km apart.
Kilometres between successive fixes, great-circle, computed from published coordinates. The 1947 fix at Allen Lake, Prince of Wales Island, is approximate.
In October 2017 it crossed the date line within 390 km of the geographic North Pole. Since then it has been heading south again.
"True north" (90°N, where the meridians meet) stays put. Magnetic north is where a free compass needle points straight down. In 2025 the two were about 445 km apart.
Distance from 90°N is computed from each fix's latitude. The 2017 figure comes from Livermore et al. (2020).
Two patches of strong magnetic flux at the edge of the core, one under Canada and one under Siberia, compete to set where north is.
Between 1999 and 2019 the Canadian patch weakened and stretched, while the Siberian patch strengthened slightly. That shift pulled the pole toward Siberia (Livermore, Finlay & Bayliff, Nature Geoscience, 2020). Core models suggest the drift will continue for at least the next few decades.
Illustrative: where we've drawn the lobes and how big they look are schematic, not data.
The World Magnetic Model, run by NOAA and the British Geological Survey, tells devices where magnetic north is. NOAA says it is in "virtually every smartphone."
The model is redone every five years. In 2018 Arctic errors were growing fast enough that they would breach spec before the cycle ended, so an out-of-cycle WMM2015v2 shipped in February 2019. WMM2025 came out in December 2024 and is valid until the end of 2029.
Jacksonville International repainted its main runway from 7-25 to 8-26 in 2011. It was the first renumbering since the airport opened in 1968. The FAA uses the WMM to rename runways.
Every compass heading, aircraft runway and phone map arrow depends on a model of a spot that moves tens of kilometres a year. When the drift sped up faster than forecast, the model needed an emergency patch. The pole is now slowing, but it is still moving away from Canada.
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