For decades, the magnetic north pole has been migrating from Canadian Arctic territory toward Russia. That shift has accelerated in recent years, and current estimates suggest that the pole is moving at almost 40 miles a year. Movements in the magnetic poles are caused by the motion of molten iron at Earth's core, which serves as the planet's magnetic dynamo. Here is how NASA explains.
Airports generally change their runway designations every few decades, depending on how the pole shifts shake out numerically. For example, Stansted Airport in the London area renamed its 23/05 runway as 22/04 in July 2009 to reflect the magnetic shift. "It'll roughly be another 56 years before we have to consider changing it again," Trevor Waldock, head of airside operations at Stansted, told the BBC at the time.
A catastrophic pole shift is one of the oft-used plot devices in doomsday tales — and some of the doomsayers have tried to link the phenomenon to the 2012 Maya apocalypse. Earth's magnetic poles have been known to reverse themselves every 400,000 years or so, in a process that's outlined in the video above.
This NASA Web page explains that the shift in the magnetic poles, or even a pole reversal, need not be feared. "As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn't cause any harm to life on Earth," NASA says. But a lot of runway numbers might need to be repainted.
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http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/07/5787088-pole-shift-forces-airport-makeover
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