The Government Shutdown Is Messing with North
The effects of the government shutdown are wide-reaching, to the extent that they're messing with the concept of North. Scientific attempts to correct for the changing location of the North Magnetic Pole have been put on halt due to the U.S. government's partial furlough.
The North Magnetic Pole itself is not a permanent place, and actually shifts with regularity, generally moving in a northwestern path across the Arctic. Scientists have kept track of the Pole's movements, as well as its South Pole sibling's, through what's known as the World Magnetic Model (WMM). This, in turn, forms the basis to translate variable magnetic readings into the permanent notion of North that's present on a map.
Geomagnetic scientist Will Brown explains how this happens in your phone all the time in a blog post:
Your phone contains a magnetometer that is measuring the Earth’s magnetic field. In order to make sense of this information a reference model like the WMM is needed to correct the measurements of magnetic north made by your phone to True North.
The WMM usually gets an update every five years with relatively little drama. Since the last update in 2015, there have been erratic changes that have surprised researchers. Starting in 2016, a geomagnetic pulse in South America sent magnetic pole lurching in an unexpected trajectory. Scientists credited the pulse to a jet stream discovered within the earth's molten core, moving approximately 25 miles a year.
By 2018, according to a report in Nature, researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh realized that a more urgent update was needed.
“The error is increasing all the time,” said Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information, speaking to Nature. The plan was for an update to be released today, on January 15.
Instead, NOAA, which operates under the auspices of the Department of Commerce, faces a government shutdown. Attempting to access NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which runs the WMM, says that "The website you are trying to access is not available at this time due to a lapse in appropriation." Instead of information about the planet's changing geophysical status, users can find letters to creditors asking for leniency for NOAA employees falling behind on payments.
With no sense of resolution on the horizon, which is related to President Trump's demand for a wall along the southern border, the WMM will remain uncorrected for the immediate future.
Source: UPI
('You Might Also Like',)
