I was given a rare opportunity which I simply couldn’t resist. Testing my monster magnet on three different servers! Will the sturdy servers be much better at handling a powerful magnetic field than what I previously have tested? There were a few surprises

The North Magnetic Pole is on the run – and scientists might finally know why.

Since it was first documented by scientists in the 1830s, the North Magnetic Pole has wandered some 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) across the upper stretches of the Northern Hemisphere from Canada towards Siberia. Between 1990 and 2005, the rate of this movement accelerated from less than 15 kilometers per year to around 50 to 60 kilometers per year.

A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues the changes could be explained by the to-ing and fro-ing between two magnetic “blobs” of molten material in the planet’s interior, causing a titanic shift of its magnetic field.

The recent shift towards Siberia, it seems, is caused by a blip in the pattern of flow in Earth’s interior that occurred between 1970 and 1999.

“What we’ve discovered is that the North Magnetic Pole’s position is controlled by two patches of magnetic field – one underneath Canada and one underneath Siberia – and they act as a tug of war effect controlling the location of the pole,”

“Now historically, the Canadian patch has been winning the war and that’s why the pole has been centered over Canada but in the last few decades, the Canadian patch has weakened and the Siberian patch has strengthened slightly,” he added.

“That explains why the pole has suddenly accelerated away from its historical position.”

The researchers reached this conclusion using data gathered by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm satellites.

NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa. This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers. The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-tracking-the-mysterious-evolving-anomaly-in-earth-s-magnetic-field