NOAA scientists have spent decades tracking how magnetic north wanders, but recent modeling shows a pole moving in ways earlier maps did not suggest. Instead of drifting slowly around the Canadian Arctic, the magnetic north pole now appears to follow a more direct path toward the high Arctic between Greenland and Siberia, based on modern satellite‑era data. Agencies do not treat this shift as a sudden disaster; they see it as a demanding test of how well current models describe what is happening deep inside Earth.
Behind headlines about a “racing” pole sits a small group of official datasets that define how every smartphone compass, aircraft navigation system, and shipboard chart interprets north. These models are updated on a regular cycle and now depict a magnetic pole that is far from the geographic pole and moving along a path that differs from older descriptions of slow, predictable drift.
How scientists define a wandering pole
Before anyone can say the magnetic pole is racing, they must agree on what “pole” they mean and how to measure it. On an official reference page about wandering geomagnetic poles, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information explain the difference between magnetic, or “dip,” poles and geomagnetic poles, and describe how each one is derived from measurements and models of Earth’s field. That same NOAA page includes numeric values for pole locations based on the World Magnetic Model 2025, giving scientists coordinates in degrees so they can talk about where magnetic north is at specific times instead of relying on rough maps.
The NOAA reference makes clear that these locations are not guessed. They are computed from a combination of direct measurements and formal models of the field. The World Magnetic Model, often shortened to WMM, is one such standard. The WMM2025 values on the wandering‑poles page are the latest official positions for the dip and geomagnetic poles. By separating dip poles, where the field lines plunge almost straight down into Earth, from geomagnetic poles, which come from an idealized dipole fit to the global field, NOAA gives researchers and navigators a precise way to describe how and where the pole is moving, rather than treating “north” as a single fixed point.
What WMM2025 says about the pole’s new path
The idea that magnetic north is “racing” comes from the latest World Magnetic Model data, which convert the complex field into yearly coordinates. NOAA has published a machine‑readable table for the WMM2025 North Pole positions that lists latitude and longitude in degrees for each year from 2025 to 2030. In that file, the pole has one pair of coordinates for 2025, another for 2026, and so on through 2030, giving six modeled positions over six calendar years. These values form a short track that shows both the direction and speed of motion, and they can be compared with earlier WMM versions to see how the path has changed.
The numeric coordinates in the WMM2025 file support the idea of a more direct path toward the geographic pole and beyond. Earlier in the twentieth century, public summaries often described the pole’s wanderings as a slow drift near the Canadian Arctic, but the new sequence of longitudes and latitudes points to a different pattern for the second half of this decade. The pole’s modeled path bends toward high northern latitudes and continues across the Arctic, with longitudes that shift steadily instead of swinging back and forth. In practice, scientists can treat each yearly position as a point on a curve and estimate a drift speed in kilometers per year, even though the NOAA text file itself focuses on degrees. Using a simple track made of six yearly points is a straightforward way to turn the WMM2025 coordinates into a clear picture of motion.
The hidden engine: IGRF‑14 and Earth’s core
Underneath the World Magnetic Model lies a more technical product called the International Geomagnetic Reference Field, now in its fourteenth generation. NOAA and its legacy National Geophysical Data Center host a plain‑text file of IGRF‑14 coefficients, which contains the main dataset used to compute global field values and pole positions. That file lists spherical harmonic terms that describe the field mathematically. Scientists plug those numbers into their own software when they want to reproduce or extend official pole calculations, so the coefficients act as a shared language linking satellite observations, ground observatories, and models like WMM2025.
The same IGRF‑14 dataset used for routine tasks, such as correcting compass readings on ships and aircraft, is also used to study deep processes in Earth’s core. Researchers can compare how specific coefficients change between IGRF releases and then compare those changes with the path traced by the pole in the WMM2025 coordinates. When the modeled pole position slides steadily along a particular longitude band for several years in a row, some scientists interpret this as a sign that flows in the outer core have changed in a way that alters certain parts of the field. In this view, the apparent “race” of magnetic north is the surface expression of changes encoded in the IGRF‑14 coefficients, which in turn reflect motions of molten iron thousands of kilometers below the surface, even though the coefficients themselves are unitless numbers in a text file.
Why the rapid drift unsettles navigation planners
For most people, magnetic north appears only as an arrow in a smartphone app or on a hiking compass, but for navigation planners the pole’s motion is a practical engineering issue. Models like WMM2025 are built into aviation procedures, maritime charts, and mobile operating systems so that headings can be corrected from magnetic to true north. When the pole’s path was treated as slower and more predictable, those corrections could be updated on a relaxed schedule of several years. A sequence of yearly coordinates, such as the six WMM2025 positions from 2025 to 2030, highlights a more assertive motion. If software or charts are not updated on a similar timescale, the gap between assumed and actual magnetic north can grow faster than expected, which can add degrees of error to headings if left unchecked.
The NOAA wandering‑poles reference now includes WMM2025‑based pole locations that sit far from the geographic pole, and this undercuts the simple idea that “north is just the top of the map.” When navigators see that the magnetic and geomagnetic poles are defined separately and that both move over time, they are reminded that runway numbers, compass bearings, and charted headings are tied to a dynamic system. Some agencies respond by shortening their update cycles so that corrections in degrees, which can be thought of as angular distances on the order of tens of kilometers at high latitudes, stay within safe limits for aircraft and ships.
Rethinking what “unexpected” really means
Calling the pole’s current motion “unexpected” can give the impression that scientists believed magnetic north should stay fixed, but core‑physics research has long treated change as normal. The existence of the IGRF‑14 coefficient file and the WMM2025 coordinate tables shows that agencies plan for variation and build it into their products. What stands out in the latest data is the combination of direction and speed: a steady march that takes the pole far from its twentieth‑century positions. At the same time, the official datasets show that the field has always been more active than classroom globes suggest, with dip poles and geomagnetic poles following their own paths rather than circling neatly around the spin axis.
Taken together, the NOAA wandering‑poles page, the WMM2025 North Magnetic Pole coordinates, and the IGRF‑14 coefficients form a clear chain from raw measurements to public claims that magnetic north is moving in a new direction. Rather than treating that motion as a sign that models have failed, many specialists see it as evidence that the models now resolve natural variability in enough detail to reveal complex behavior. The pole is moving, the data are explicit, and the main challenge for navigation planners is to keep software, charts, and expectations aligned with a magnetic field that continues to evolve.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
