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Old 02-23-2006, 02:06 PM   #45
Island-Ho
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Default Watch the ice bergs

If you follow a rhumb line north from any point on earth you will end up at the geographic north pole, but watch out for land masses and ice bergs! Don't try this with a magnetic compass, you'll end up somewhere in the Canadian Arctic. As a side note, a magnetic compass doesn't really work anywhere near (hundreds of miles) the magnetic north pole, as the magnetic field lines it is trying to align with are nearly vertical, and the pointer or card tries to point straight down. While flying over northern Greenland in a helicopter, I noticed that all the mag compass could do was spin in circles!
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