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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 ...
Magnetic north is the direction that the north end of a magnetized compass needle points, which corresponds to the direction of the Earth's magnetic field lines. True north is the direction along a meridian towards the geographic North Pole .
If the Earth's magnetic field were a perfect dipole, the field lines would be vertical to the surface at the Geomagnetic Poles, and they would align with the North and South magnetic poles, with the North Magnetic Pole at the south end of dipole. However, the approximation is imperfect, and so the Magnetic and Geomagnetic Poles lie some ...
Magnetic north versus ‘true north’ At the top of the world in the middle of the Arctic Ocean lies the geographic North Pole, the point where all the lines of longitude that curve around Earth ...
The South Pole is the other point where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface, in Antarctica. Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the Sun, but once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds with respect to other distant stars . Earth's rotation is slowing slightly with time; thus, a day was shorter in the past.
Notice that the South Pole of that magnet is deep in Earth's interior below Earth's North Magnetic Pole. Earth's magnetic field is produced in the outer liquid part of its core due to a dynamo that produce electrical currents there. The ions and electrons of a plasma interacting with the Earth's magnetic field generally follow its magnetic ...
The earliest use of these terms cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is by Walter M. Elsasser (1946) in the context of the generation of the Earth's magnetic field by currents in the core, with "toroidal" being parallel to lines of constant latitude and "poloidal" being in the direction of the magnetic field (i.e. towards the poles).
The south magnetic pole, also known as the magnetic south pole, is the point on Earth's Southern Hemisphere where the geomagnetic field lines are directed perpendicular to the nominal surface. The Geomagnetic South Pole, a related point, is the south pole of an ideal dipole model of the Earth's magnetic field that most closely fits the Earth's ...