Poles

January 5, 2026

Whilst listening to the 2025 Christmas episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage [1] - a comedic science podcast hosted by the BBC, and one that I would highly recommend - there was a discussion on all the different types and interpretations of the North Pole. This is a short post to visualise the poles discussed in this podcast.

The different north poles discussed were (snapshot as of January 2026):

• ● Geographic - the true north pole at Earth’s rotation axis (90.00, 0.00)
• ● Magnetic - where a compass needle points; wanders over time [2] , for updated positions and a visualisation of pole drift over time, see [3] (85.762, 139.078)
• ● Geo-Magnetic - best‑fit dipole pole from the global field model [4] (80.70, -72.70)
• ● Pole of Inaccessibility/Arctic Pole - farthest point from any landmass [5] (84.48, -176.9)
• ● Pole of Ice - Oymyakon, Russia (coldest permanently inhabited place) [6] (63.46, 142.78)

Note: there is also a celestial north pole — the direction Earth’s rotation axis points on the sky [7] . It coincides with the geographic pole on this axis, so I’m not plotting it separately here.