Wandering North Magnetic Pole

In a more prosaic attempt to define the Arctic we have arranged it around several poles. The precise location of the most exact of these northern poles, the North Pole itself, varies (on a small scale). Tectonic activity, the gravitational pull on the moon, and the continuous transport of sediments from one place to another and by rivers cause the death to wobble slightly, and its axis to shift as it does so. In the north Pole were a scribing stylus, it would trace a line every 428 days in the shape of an irregular circle, with a diameter varying from 25 to 30 feet. Over the years, these irregular circles would all fall within an area some 65 feet across called the Chandler Circle. The average position of the center of this circle is the Geographic North Pole.

Other northern poles are as hard to locate precisely. In 1981 the North Magnetic Pole, around which the earth's magnetic field and its magnetosphere (far above the earth's atmosphere) are organized, lay at 77*N 120*W, some 30 miles east of Edmund Walker Island, at the southern end of the Findlay Group. This is 400 miles further north and somewhat west to where it was when James Clark Ross discovered it in 1831, on the west side of Bothia Peninsula. ~ Page 18