But now something bizarre is taking place. Earth's north magnetic pole has been rapidly shifting away from Canada and towards the Siberian Federal District, driven mostly by liquid iron churning deep within the planet's core.

"The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world's geomagnetism experts into a rare move," Nature reported.

On January 30 (delayed due to the US Government shutdown), the World Magnetic Model (WMM), a large spatial-scale representation of the Earth's magnetic field, will be updated.

WMM is the standard geomagnetic model of the US Department of Defense (DoD), the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the World Hydrographic Office (WHO) navigation and attitude/heading reference.

The current model was expected to be valid until 2020, but extraordinarily large and erratic movements of the north magnetic pole have been realized and had to be fixed immediately.