In September 2019, for the first time in several hundred years, the compass will point to true North. Scientists claim this is an extremely rare event.
If you think your compass has pointed you “true North” , sorry to say that’s wrong.
In fact, the needle on a compass is constantly oscillating between true North and magnetic North, due to fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field.
However, at some point in September, the compass at Greenwich, England, will point North most accurately for the first time in about 360 years. For some parts of the UK, this may not be the case for another 20 years.
In the last few hundred years in Britain, the angle between true North and magnetic North was called declination . This also means that all compass needles do not point to the true West.
The Royal Observatory Greenwich has continuously monitored the decline since 1840, using a dedicated magnetic observatory.
“This marks the first time since the creation of the observatory that geo- and magnetic-field coordination systems have coincided at this site,” said Dr Ciaran Beggan, a geoscientist at the Lyell Center. of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.