Earth's magnetic fields are shifting - and scientists are unsure why.
Researchers say the magnetic North Pole is 'skittering' away from Canada, towards Siberia.
The problem has got so bad, researchers around the world are scrambling to update a global model of the fields.
Called the World Magnetic Model, it underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.
Scroll down for video
Researchers say the magnetic North Pole is 'skittering' away from Canada, towards Siberia, far more quickly that they expected it to.
The problem lies partly with the moving pole and partly with other shifts deep within the planet.
Liquid churning in Earth's core generates most of the magnetic field, which varies over time as the deep flows change.
In 2016, for instance, part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean. Satellites such as the European Space Agency's Swarm mission tracked the shift.
The most recent version of the model came out in 2015, and it was supposed to last until 2020.
However, researchers say the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that they have to fix the model urgently.
It was due to be updated on the 15th January, but due to the US Government shutdown, that has already been delayed until the 30th.
'It's moving at about 50 km (30 miles) a year. It didn't move much between 1900 and 1980 but it's really accelerated in the past 40 years,' Ciaran Beggan, of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, told Reuters on Friday.
The magnetic field is in a permanent state of flux.
Magnetic north wanders, and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so that a compass would point south instead of north.
'The error is increasing all the time,' Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Information, told Nature.
'In early 2018, as part of our regular assessment of the WMM, we found that the model exceeded its specification for declination only three years into the five-year WMM cycle,' he told the American Geophysical Union meeting.
'We investigated this error and tracked it down to the combined effect of a global geomagnetic acceleration pulse occurring in 2015-2016, and a fast-changing magnetic field in the North polar area.
'A remarkable manifestation of the field variation is the drift of the North magnetic pole towards Russia, which has been occurring at the unusually high speed of about 50 km per year since the beginning of the 21st century.
'On the contrary, the South magnetic pole drift is very slow (less than 10 km per year) and has not changed much over the past few decades, and hence provided a much smaller contribution to the overall model declination error.'
To fix the model, he and his colleagues fed it three years of recent data, which included a 2016 geomagnetic pulse, and he says the new model, when it is released, should remain accurate until the next regularly scheduled update in 2020.
Satellites such as the European Space Agency's Swarm mission tracked the shift.
Phil Livermore, a geomagnetist at the University of Leeds, UK, said at the American Geophysical Union meeting 'the location of the north magnetic pole appears to be governed by two large-scale patches of magnetic field, one beneath Canada and one beneath Siberia,' Livermore says.
'The Siberian patch is winning the competition.'
The charts, known as the World Magnetic Model (WMM), are used to convert between compass measurements of magnetic north and true north and can be found in the navigation systems of ships and airplanes as well as geological applications (such as drilling and mining).
The WMM is also part of map applications in smartphones, including the Google Maps App.
Researchers from the U.S.'s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintain the WMM.
The charts, known as the World Magnetic Model (WMM), are used to convert between compass measurements of magnetic north and true north
'Although GPS is a great tool for navigation, it is limited in that it only provides your position,' geodetic scientist James Friederich from the U. S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency explained in 2014.
'Your orientation, the direction you are facing, comes from the magnetic field.'
'Our war fighters use magnetics to orient their maps.
'Your smartphone camera and various apps can use the magnetic field to help determine the direction you are facing,' he continued.
'All of these examples need the WMM to provide your proper orientation.'
Scientists in recent years have predicted that Earth's magnetic field could be gearing up to 'flip' – a shift in which the magnetic south pole would become magnetic north, and
