At first blush, Frank Klein is another distinguished veteran in a military town full of them. But the 96-year-old retired U.S. Air Force colonel can also lay claim to a special footnote in history. In addition to being a decorated officer and skilled navigator, he’s the man who helped redefine where north was.

The Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, native’s journey to his footnote was a circuitous one. Following high school, he had a mind to go into acting and actually moved to New York City. For a year he had a role on a weekly CBS radio program, where he would rub shoulders with other aspiring actors such as Burgess Meredith.

Then came World War II. In 1941, knowing the draft was most likely in his future, Klein enlisted in the U.S. Army. He eventually tested into what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he would serve at various times as a pilot, navigator, radar operator, bombardier and nose gunner. However, he was principally a photo-navigator, snapping pictures from his plane of unmapped parts of both the U.S. and Pacific to aid cartographic efforts.

As the Cold War got underway, the U.S. decided it needed to undertake a comprehensive survey of the North American Arctic area. Called Project Nanook, it involved multiple interrelated missions. Klein was part of Project Polaris, a massive mapping of the Canadian archipelago, the more than 36,000 islands sitting in the Arctic Sea.

When a compass points north, it’s not actually pointing to truth north, or the geographically topmost point on the planet. Instead it’s drawn toward magnetic north, or the north pole of the Earth’s magnetic field. Except for people living along a specific line, there is always a difference between true north and magnetic north, called declination. In Sierra Vista that declination is 9.53 degrees.

The field is thought to be generated by liquid metal in the Earth’s outer core, surrounding the solid inner center. As that liquid core moves, it produces electrical currents. The rotation of the planet about its axis creates a dynamo effect that produces the magnetic field. Scientists have theorized that this molten core is in constant motion, resulting in changes in its magnetism, which in turn is moving the north magnetic pole on the surface.

Various locations for this pole’s location have been calculated or guessed for the past 400 years. British explorer James Clark Ross tracked it down to the western side of the Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada in an 1831 expedition. In 1904, Roald Amundsen placed it slightly to the northeast of Ross’s expedition. More than four decades later, Klein came along.

“In 1947, I located it about 200 miles from where those guys put it,” he said.

It started because when Klein took the northern assignment, he was told by everyone not to trust the fluxgate compass in the plane. However, contrary to prevailing wisdom that the polar regions played havoc with the instrument, he found that – with few exceptions – his compass was still reliable.

Intrigued, and on his own initiative, he began plotting the difference in his compass reading and that of an astrocompass, which pinpoints direction via celestial bodies. He asked for similar data from anyone flying in the area. And when he laid out all the data – some 1,500 to 2,000 readings all told – he discovered something intriguing. The magnetic pole – sometimes called the dip pole because it’s where the magnetic field dips vertically into the Earth – was sitting off of Prince of Wales Island, 200 miles away from the Ross and Amundsen locations.

But more than that, he showed the pole was sitting at the bottom of a larger elliptical area. And that area contained two foci points or local magnetic poles as well – which could disrupt a compass.

Shortly after Klein made his findings known, a Canadian group would man an expedition to the site to confirm his readings. He received a note from one of those researchers saying he also believed the pole had moved to Prince of Wales Island, but had pinpointed it to a spot 20 miles away from where Klein did. However, after reading the American’s research, he decided to use Klein’s position.

Looking back, Klein has a smile on his face while describing the complicated math involved in his discovery.

Further studies conducted since 1948 have shown the pole is still moving, and at a fairly fast clip. A study presented at the American Geophysical Union in 2009 concluded the pole is actually drifting northwest toward Russia at nearly 40 miles per year. It’s estimated to have moved nearly 700 miles in the 20th century alone. Today, the pole is in the Arctic Sea, hundreds of miles from where Klein plotted it.

And, so, Klein’s contribution became a footnote, just another data point on that journey.

But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been recognized. In 1999, once his missions over the Arctic were declassified, his former commanding officer, Maynard White, recommended Klein for the Legion of Merit award.

Among other accolades, the letter says that Klein’s work “which held considerable significance at the time, compelled revisions in textbooks and maps the world over.” Klein was also able to map “so-called secondary or local magnetic poles” and contributed to the understanding of the moving magnetic pole, the letter says.

Skip Theberge, a librarian and archivists the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, said Klein’s discovery couldn’t be called earth-shattering, but it was one more step to understanding various things about the planet and how it functions.

“The fact that he was willing to engage in that, you can put him down as a pioneer in advanced geomagnetic research,” he said.

Klein, though, said that though his time spent in the Arctic is something he has never forgotten, he was merely doing his duty.

“I can’t deny that I’m proud of the work, but it’s work. And I’m happy about it,” he said.

how long will it be before someone says that human existence causes magnetic north to drift?

NASA: Earth’s poles are tipping thanks to climate change

Science Apr 8, 2016 4:58 PM EST

The north pole is on the run. Although it can drift as much as 10 meters across a century, sometimes returning to near its origin, it has recently taken a sharp turn to the east. Climate change is the likely culprit, yet scientists are debating how much melting ice or changing rain patterns affect the pole’s wanderlust.

The geographical poles—the north and south tips of the axis that the Earth spins around—wobble over time due to small variations in the sun’s and moon’s pulls, and potentially to motion in Earth’s core and mantle. But changes on the planet’s surface can alter the poles, too. They wobble with every season as the distribution of snow and rain change, and over long stretches as well.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, for example, Earth woke up from a deep freeze and the massive ice sheets sitting atop what is now Canada melted. As ice mass fled, and the depressed crust rebounded, the distribution of the planet’s mass changed and the north pole started to drift west. This pattern can be clearly seen in data from 1899 onward. But a recent zigzag in the north pole’s path (and the opposite movement in the south pole) suggests a new change is afoot.

Around 2000 the pole took an eastward turn; it stopped drifting toward Hudson Bay, Canada, and started drifting along the Greenwich meridian in the direction of London. In 2013, Jianli Chen, a geophysicist at The University of Texas at Austin, was the first to attribute the sudden change to accelerated melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The result startled his team.

“If you’re losing enough mass to change the orientation of the Earth—that’s a lot of mass,” says John Ries, Chen’s colleague at U.T. Austin. The team found that recent accelerated ice loss and associated sea level rise accounted for more than 90 percent of the latest polar shift. Of course that includes ice lost across the world, but “Greenland is the lion’s share of the mass loss,” Ries says. “That’s what’s causing the pole to change its nature.”

Could such a dramatic shift be so simple? In a new study published today in Science Advances, Surendra Adhikari and Erik Ivins, two geophysicists from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, think another mechanism might be at play: changes in the amount of water held within the continents. Like Chen’s team, Adhikari and Ivins compared data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, which measures changes in Earth’s gravitational field, with Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements of the north and south poles. But Adhikari and Ivins have a couple extra years of data. They also incorporated small-scale features within the GRACE data set that are more directly related to terrestrial water storage.

Although the predominant cause of the pole’s shift still turned out to be Greenland, a recent dry spell that has overrun Eurasia is also driving the pole toward the east, Ivans says. With less rainfall on a continent over time, it starts to shed some bulkAdhikari and Ivins think the sudden shift could be the latest in a series of decadal changes in drift that scientists have been unable to explain. Eurasia, which was quite lush 10 years ago, is not the only continent to experience a drought. “We think this flip is happening all the time,” Ivins says. “It’s a natural phenomenon that characterizes the entire Earth rotation time-series going all the way back to 1899.”

The data do not indicate whether the recent climate changes are man-made, but Chen personally believes the drastic shift in the pole has to be the result of human activities. Meanwhile Ivins thinks he will be able to tease man-made climate change from the data in another six months or so.

Given that polar motion and climate variability seem to be inextricably linked, scientists can look at historical records of the pole’s motion (which date back to well before the advent of GPS and the GRACE satellite) and see changes in Earth’s climate. If those changes are less dramatic than the ones we see today, Ivins says, then scientists could say that global warming has a controlling influence on Earth’s poles.

This article is reproduced with permission from Scientific American. It was first published on April 8, 2016. Find the original story here.

This scientific paper suggests that the Earth's magnetic field may be partly responsible for alleged 'global warming'. Not that "global warming" is altering the field.

Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?

Type de publication: Journal Article
Auteurs: Vincent Courtillot; Yves Gallet; Jean-Louis Le Mouël; Frédéric Fluteau; Genevey, A.

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 253, Ticket 3-4, p.328-339 (2007)
ISBN: 0012-821X

URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X06007667

Mots-clés: MARGIN; CARBON-CYCLE; INTENSITY

Résumé: Understanding climate change is an active topic of research. Much of the observed increase in global surface temperature over the past 150 years occurred prior to the 1940s and after the 1980s.

The main causes invoked are solar variability, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas content or sulfur due to natural or anthropogenic action, or internal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system.

Magnetism has seldom been invoked, and evidence for connections between climate and magnetic field variations have received little attention.

We review evidence for correlations which could suggest such (causal or non-causal) connections at various time scales (recent secular variation similar to 10-100 yr, historical and archcomagnetic change similar to 100-5000 yr, and excursions and reversals similar to 101-10, yr), and attempt to suggest mechanisms.

Evidence for correlations, which invoke Milankovic forcing in the core, either directly or through changes in ice distribution and moments of inertia of the Earth, is still tenuous.

Correlation between decadal changes in amplitude of geomagnetic variations of external origin, solar irradiance and global temperature is stronger.

It suggests that solar irradiance could have been a major forcing function of climate until the mid-1980s, when “anomalous” warming becomes apparent.

The most intriguing feature may be the recently proposed archeomagnetic jerks, i.e. fairly abrupt (similar to 100 yr long) geomagnetic field variations found at irregular intervals over the past few millennia, using the archeological record from Europe to the Middle East.

These seem to correlate with significant climatic events in the eastern North Atlantic region.

A proposed mechanism involves variations in the geometry of the geomagnetic field (f.i. tilt of the dipole to lower latitudes), resulting in enhanced cosmic-ray induced nucleation of clouds.

No forcing factor, be it changes in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere or changes in cosmic ray flux modulated by solar activity and geomagnetism, or possibly other factors, can at present be neglected or shown to be the overwhelming single driver of climate change in past centuries.

Intensive data acquisition is required to further probe indications that the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields may have significant bearing on climate change at certain time scales.

http://www.ipgp.fr/fr/are-there-connections-between-the-earths-magnetic-field-and-climate

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