The needle that points north is actually being pulled by a magnetic SOUTH pole: Earth’s geographic north is where the south end of the giant magnet born in the liquid iron core sits, and that magnetic axis is tilted about 11 degrees from the spin axis. The magnetosphere is therefore no sphere but a teardrop, squashed on the dayside and drawn out into a tail on the nightside. As the solar wind strengthens from 250 to 1,000 km/s it presses the magnetopause inward, and one such storm brought down the Quebec power grid in 1989.
The needle that points north is actually being pulled by a magnetic SOUTH pole: Earth’s geographic north is where the south end of the giant magnet born in the liquid iron core sits, and that magnetic axis is tilted about 11 degrees from the spin axis. The magnetosphere is therefore no sphere but a teardrop, squashed on the dayside and drawn out into a tail on the nightside. As the solar wind strengthens from 250 to 1,000 km/s it presses the magnetopause inward, and one such storm brought down the Quebec power grid in 1989.
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