Magnetic North: Phenomenon Attracts Visitors

Helen Thayer of Snohomish, Wash., ran a comb through her hair and observed the results in her compass mirror.

It was 4:30 a.m. A fine day for walking on ice, she thought as she primped in the dusky glow of a slanting midnight sun--no sign of bears.

Suddenly the needle on the small instrument in her hand began spinning wildly from side to side. Right away she knew what was happening.

“Come quick! Look at this thing!” Thayer, 54, the 1975 U.S. women’s luge champion, shouted to her husband, Bill, 65, a retired helicopter pilot. He was inside their tent packing for another day’s hike over the frozen sea toward the place where they wanted to commemorate their 30th wedding anniversary: the magnetic North Pole.

Forget it. The wandering ghost twin of the geographic North Pole had come and gone, passing through their camp on one of its giddy day trips.

Their chances at any given moment of actually being in the path of the moving pole were roughly equal to being hit by lightning while standing in a thunderstorm.

Recognized at least since the 16th Century as the place in whose general direction compass needles point, magnetic north is one of Earth’s best-known but least-understood physical phenomena.

“There’s a great deal of confusion out there about the difference between the geographic and magnetic poles,” said Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada. “Most people realize there is a difference, but they’re a bit hazy on what it really is.”

Some believe that the magnetic pole, the spot in the Northern Hemisphere where all the Earth’s lines of magnetic force converge, has magical powers. Newitt recalls a few years ago running into a young couple from southern Canada who had come to conceive a child at the magnetic North Pole.

“They had some vague idea that because the magnetic field points straight up and down, it would have some sort of mystical properties”--a misconception, Newitt said.

The geographic North Pole is a fixed location, the northernmost point on the planet. The magnetic North Pole continuously shifts position in the Arctic. It is now located at sea, about 93 miles north of Bathurst Island’s May Inlet.

There are enough odd things about magnetic north to keep most people’s eyebrows elevated without resorting to New Age fancies.

Researchers in a relatively young science called geomagnetbiology have no doubt that the Earth’s force fields have profound effects on living organisms. Magnetic fields may even have played a major role in determining the course of evolution.

Some scientists have correlated disturbances in the Earth’s force fields with psychotic behavior and heart attacks in humans.

The motions of the magnetic North Pole alone are enough to arouse awe. It wobbles about the eastern Arctic like a drunken titan, jostled here and there by activity taking place almost 93 million miles away on the surface of the sun.

Solar disturbances such as flares coincide with magnetic storms that thunder through space and crash into Earth’s magnetic field, battering it like a large blob of Jell-O in a hurricane. The thrumming of the magnetosphere causes the magnetic poles, north and south, to sway dizzily across land and sea.

Pilgrims to the pole, like the Thayers, must aim for a geographical point, fixed periodically by Canadian government scientists like Newitt, as the average location of the pole for any given period.

Aside from its random daily motions, the pole is listing north-northwestward. Since 1831, when it was first reliably fixed, it has meandered about 530 miles in the general direction of its alter ego, the geographic North Pole.

Iron filings thrown into the air near the pole will not fly toward it--a common misconception probably based on grade-school diagrams that attempt to explain things by showing an imaginary magnet in the center of the Earth. The pole itself exerts no special pull. Compass needles simply line up along the Earth’s lines of magnetic force.

The magnetic pole does attract visitors.

Although the Thayers had theoretically reached the pole because of its swift, unexpected visit, they continued their 350-mile journey. Four days later they reached the point currently designated as the center of the pole’s daily wanderings. There they toasted their anniversary.

The journey included encounters with five polar bears, one of which came within 50 feet before 21 shots from a flare pistol dissuaded it from coming farther. Bill loaded and Helen fired.

“Some people,” said Helen Thayer, “would have gone and had a nice quiet dinner.”