This would have gone in the science links on Friday if I had been able to find an article whose headline didn’t have misleading things in it. I know, I should have just written my own. Anyway, so the magnetic field of the planet always fluctuates and wiggles around a bit, and back in the day when a compass was always an object at least big enough to fill the palm of your hand, the amount of drift didn’t matter. But modern navigation devices (and the way we use them) require a bit more precision, so scientists map the field changes and try to build mathematical models that allow the computerized navigation aids to take the changes in the field into account. Well, things have been a bit more dicey than usual the last few years: Erratic motion of north magnetic pole forces experts to update model that aids global navigation.

So we desperately need to start updating the models more often, and also, we really need to update now because the drift has exceeded the previous model’s margin of error. Simple, right? Well: Scientists Can’t Fix Map of Earth’s Magnetic Field Thanks to the Government Shutdown –
The federal government was set to update the World Magnetic Model but had to delay it because of the shutdown.

That’s right. Cadet Bonespur’s temper tantrum is messing with global navigation systems, too.