Order of the Bath

By convention, the ends of a magnet are labelled North & South to reflect the direction they point when it is freely suspended. The magnetic field of the earth can be likened to a big bar magnet.

Question: Approximately where would the North pole of this magnet be located.

Answer: Somewhere in the Antarctic. Yes, it was a trick question! Unlike poles attract; like poles repel; so for the North pole of a compass needle to point North, it must be attracted by a South magnetic pole somewhere on the Arctic ice sheet north of Canada (about 7 degrees away from the True North Pole.)

This entry was posted on 21 Apr 2007 at 17:38 by Rick and is filed under Navigation, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.