Look at this—a line of perfect dime-size pinhole-projected suns across my legal pad this morning. It takes me a minute to figure it out—I’m not in Dallas, where I live most of the time, but in the little town of Corsicana, Texas, about an hour south, where my wife, an artist, has a downtown studio and, a mile away, an old Victorian house where the dogs and I have joined her to wait out the pandemic and where I have a little writing desk in a corner with a window to my left, the south, whose ripply panes must be as old as the rest and whose accordion shade, half raised, has tiny holes where the cord goes through and through which holes the sun projects onto my pad. I love such accidental revelations. Most are not as clear as these—if there were a major sunspot group, I might detect it. Or an eclipse, I could observe right here—six tiny, deepening crescents. I draw a ring around each one and note the date and time. If it’s clear tomorrow, I will mark how much they drift.
For centuries, the Magnetic North Pole to which compasses point has shifted locations—though in recent years, it has been moving around even more rapidly due to changes deep in the Earth’s core, making navigating the north trickier than normal.
I think as a child I pretty much took fear as a ground state. A default condition—from which all the items of experience emerged. The nonspecific background noise of life. Which may, of course, be how it is for everyone. Though eventually gotten used to, I suppose. A sort of tinnitus of the soul. You let it go. And after a while forget to hear it. So how strange out here, already so quiet, now with such a stillness further imposed, to pick it up again as when you realize the first cicadas of the season have been whispering for a while. Ah, there it is. Though I’m too old, too out of practice to respond in that visceral way. But there it is. Fear as a general thing. Dispersed and fundamental. As I feared. Right out of the ground like the cicadas. Here in Navarro County fifty-seven cases and two deaths so far. One keeps the count.
The projections seem to drift (as, over the next few days, I detect by noting spacing irregularities) not up or down the page in rank as I expected, but processionally to the left as beads on a string drawn at an angle across my desk. This I interpret right away—I see no other possibility—to indicate an increase in the rate of the earth’s rotation. That our fearful days and nights must be accelerating. And that even now, those living nearest the equator, where centrifugal force would be the most pronounced, might feel a certain loss of gravity. A sense of failed attachment. I am enchanted by the subtlety, the delicate indirection of my terrible discovery. Like ripples in the teacup at the tyrannosaur’s approach. I can’t imagine there is anything to do. And I wonder, sitting with my wife out on the porch in the evening, whether I should tell her. On top of everything else. She’ll find out soon enough, of course.
Well, there you go. Sprung loose. A fear so deep can seem almost ecstatic. That we find ourselves at last within a sort of whirling stillness in this strangely cloistered time.
And it would seem unkind to ruin such a lovely evening with the prospect of such stillness giving way to such a lightness. People walking with their dogs, occasional cyclist creaking past will, at some point, find loss of traction a concern. The trains that come through here will make a softer rumble. Spiderwebs will find new forms. What could have happened? Something must have sprung loose, somehow. Like that time my pocket watch—a silly college affectation—fell from my pocket to the hard tile floor as I sat on the toilet dumbly staring down to watch the hands speed up, the gears beginning to whir away the hours faster and faster, life and hope escaping there within that sad, embarrassed, cloistered moment. Maybe something cosmologically like that. Or geologically—that thing I read about the recent shifting of the earth’s magnetic field. The rearranging of the molten core, I think. Well, there you go. Sprung loose. A fear so deep can seem almost ecstatic. That we find ourselves at last within a sort of whirling stillness in this strangely cloistered time. Like “whirling dervishes” I saw a number of years ago in Bursa on the Sea of Marmara. Spinning faster and faster, as it seemed, into a deeper form of stillness.
The Essentials
The Magnetic North Pole
- As in the North Pole? No—the geographic North Pole is a fixed point in the world, at latitude 90°N, where Earth’s axis reaches its surface. The magnetic North Pole is a separate point, at 86.50°N and 164.04°W—though it wanders.
- What is it, then? Magnetic north is where Earth’s magnetic field points vertically downward—the place to which magnetic compasses used by sailors, pilots, hikers, and iPhones point.
- And it moves? Yes. People once believed that compasses directed people toward a pole star or a magnetic lodestone mountain at the North Pole. But nearly two centuries ago, as scientific observation progressed, an expedition located magnetic north on a peninsula in the northern Canadian archipelago—after a ship seeking the Northwest Passage got stuck in ice for four years and a small party embarked on an excursion to find its position. But since then, the pole has moved hundreds of miles mostly northwestward, toward Siberia—until it crossed the international dateline in 2017 and started moving south. In recent decades, it has accelerated to move about 35 miles a year, albeit inconsistently.
- Why did it accelerate? Scientists believe the Earth’s magnetic field is tied to the movements of an ocean of liquid iron atop the Earth’s inner core—“a world within a world,” as NASA put it. Two patches of that occasionally turbulent ocean (it has its own equivalent of hurricanes) govern magnetic north’s location: one in Canada and another in Siberia. Recently, the one in Canada grew much weaker, and it is quickly losing the subterranean tug-of-war over the pole.
- Is this movement normal? No and yes. A recent paper in Nature Geoscience explained that, “Over the last 400 years, the pole has meandered quasistably around northern Canada, but over the last 7,000 years it seems to have chaotically moved around the geographic pole, showing no preferred location.”
- Who is keeping an eye on it? Every five years, scientists commissioned by the U.S. and British militaries use satellite and ground observations to build a new map of the Earth’s magnetic field that helps update various navigation systems on airplanes, ships, submarines, satellites, cars, and phones, which use compasses in addition to GPS for orientation.
- Does the movement have any consequences? It's especially tricky for international flights and those traveling through the Arctic, where the differences between a good and a bad reading are more acute. In early 2019, someone using the model as it functioned at the time to travel to the Magnetic North Pole would actually have been 25 miles off—though the model has since been updated.
- Is there a South Magnetic Pole? There is, though over thousands of years, the two poles could actually flip positions as a result of dramatic shifts in the iron ocean at the Earth’s core. During this time, the Earth’s magnetic field would become “twisted and tangled,” per NASA. For instance, the Northern Lights—which are caused by solar-flare particles colliding with the Earth’s magnetic field—could appear in strange, not-so-northern locations. -Published June 13, 2020
I will follow the projections, draw my circles, but say nothing for a while. And let our evenings on the porch acquire such lightness that the swifts seem borne on ever higher currents and the crickets’ song escapes us altogether. And I’ll count the deaths as those who lose attachment here and there to lift away like lost balloons.