And now for something completely different

A little research project that got prompted by something a lot of us have seen over the last few years.  

The point of interest is the position of the north magnetic pole and its migration over the last hundred or so years.  This plot sums it up nicely. 

As the graphic itself says, it's from a graphics site called Dreamstime.com, and that's really just about all we know about it. 

The point of this plot is to show the movement of the magnetic pole in the solid, light blue line, with dates in red dots along the line.  The line is fairly neatly shown; it doesn't wander much, and the dates are easy to read.  At the bottom end, the distance between 1904 and 1831 is much smaller than between 1904 and 1948 and it's clearly quite a bit wonky from 1831 and the other dates on the left, but the overall impression is still a steady, relentless movement of the pole toward the top of the map - that middle circle with all the lines converging toward its center is the geographic north pole, so the magnetic pole has gone "over the pole" and is moving into Asiatic Russia at the top.  

There's a group of people who think this is evidence that the pole is about to flip from being the north here with the south somewhere down near Antarctica over to this being the south pole, swapping positions between north and south.  The essence of the argument is that this has happened before and there's evidence that it has happened many times.  Because of that, "we're due" for another flip. 

Because of that, I started trying to look for other examples of the north pole's movement and stumbled across a great example this week. I'd like to know what the "historical normal" looks like. This is the movement of the pole from 200 AD until 2007, which is pretty easy to spot on the previous map.  Sorry about the clip off on the right - this is from a file available on Research Gate.

 

The start of the curve is in the "upper left" and marked 200 AD.  The path, in red with some dates printed, wraps around the physical north pole several times, and in bottom-center area you'll see familiar dates from the previous map and the relatively straight, simple path tracked out with yellow dots until 2007, so it's only slightly smaller than the previous map.  It ends in 2007 instead of 2020. 

So why is this here?  First of all, I find it interesting.  Second, it shows that the movement of the north magnetic pole isn't unusual.  It moves all the time.  It becomes obvious when you look at distances between the spots that the speed the pole moves goes up and down over and over, too. Nobody knows why for sure. Since we don't have charts like this from the last N/S pole reversal we have no idea if looked like this, or if it had more or even less pole movement before the last swap.  The last pole flip was 780,000 years ago, but the average time is 450,000 years between pole swaps. 

No we don't know if this is leading to a magnetic pole swap. We don't know if disasters are coming or if it's just plain "life as usual." Like most other disasters in life.