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The north magnetic pole, also known as the magnetic north pole, is a point on the surface of Earth's Northern Hemisphere at which the planet's magnetic field points vertically downward (in other words, if a magnetic compass needle is allowed to rotate in three dimensions, it will point straight down).
A magnet's North pole is defined as the pole that is attracted by the Earth's North Magnetic Pole, in the arctic region, when the magnet is suspended so it can turn freely. Since opposite poles attract, the North Magnetic Pole of the Earth is really the south pole of its magnetic field (the place where the field is directed downward into the ...
The negative pole is the pole toward which the thumb points when the fingers of the left hand are curled in its direction of rotation. This change was needed because the poles of some asteroids and comets precess rapidly enough for their north and south poles to swap within a few decades using the invariable plane definition.
Like the North Magnetic Pole, the North Geomagnetic Pole attracts the north pole of a bar magnet and so is in a physical sense actually a magnetic south pole. It is the center of the 'open' magnetic field lines which connect to the interplanetary magnetic field and provide a direct route for the solar wind to reach the ionosphere.
Dark areas denote periods where the polarity matches today's normal polarity; light areas denote periods where that polarity is reversed. A geomagnetic reversal is a change in a planet's dipole magnetic field such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged (not to be confused with geographic north and geographic ...
The magnetic North Pole is sometimes confused with the geographic North Pole, but this spot stays at the same place as it is where all lines of longitude converge.
The approximate position of the north celestial pole is indicated by Polaris (the North Star). In the northern hemisphere, declination can therefore be approximately determined as the difference between the magnetic bearing and a visual bearing on Polaris.
As Earth's magnetic field lines are not parallel to the surface, the north end of a compass needle will point upward in the Southern Hemisphere (negative dip) or downward in the Northern Hemisphere (positive dip). The range of dip is from -90 degrees (at the South Magnetic Pole) to +90 degrees (at the North Magnetic Pole). [3]