There’s a North Pole, where Santa lives stuck in the ground and secondly, there’s a Magnetic North, where the magnets live our steering compasses, and our handheld compasses are magnetic devices, and they point towards magnetic north not True North.

However, our charts are all orientated to True North. The resulting angle between magnetic north, and true north is what we call variation and it will change according to where you are on the planet.

So why do we do this? Why don’t we just orient our magnet and be done with it orientated towards the North Pole? True North because it’s a fixed position on the globe and it doesn’t move. However, magnetic does. The Magnetic Pole or the center of the magnetic field is currently moving east around the top of the planet. And because it moves consistently, it’s impossible to orient affected chart towards moving object.

True north is a fixed point on the globe. Magnetic north is quite different.

Magnetic north is the direction that a compass needle points to as it aligns with the Earth’s magnetic field. What is interesting is that the magnetic North Pole shifts and changes over time in response to changes in the Earth’s magnetic core.