1. So, looking from our new position which i designated in the picture below, magnetic south is to the true WEST, and magnetic north is to the true NORTH, how can you justify such a ludicrous geometry which doesn't exist in reality :
2. I just got back from my five week Patagonia/Antarctica trip last week. Just before leaving for the Antarctica segment of the trip, I did an experiment in the city of Ushuaia which is located on the southern tip of South America. It's latitude 54°48′south. I visited a local park that had a large decorative compass made out of stone. I used it to get my north, south, east, west bearings. Side by side I set up a North American compass, a global compass, and an iPhone compass. All three pointed in the exact same direction - north (see photo below). I mentioned my experiment to a guy I met from Australia. He said, "Of course they pointed north. A compass will point north unless you sitting on the South Pole..." As I mentioned in my previous post, this was not a huge issue for me but it was fun finding out the answer. SEE PHOTO :
http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/17050-north-south.html
I mentioned my experiment to a guy I met from Australia. He said, "Of course they pointed north. A compass will point north unless you sitting on the South Pole..."
He's wrong. It points North EVERYWHERE. As others mentioned, it might be pointing DOWN at the South MAGNETIC Pole (not the Geographic Pole) but it will ALWAYS point towards the North MAGNETIC Pole.
3. Originally Posted by Trail Bandit View Post
I have no idea how explorers, sailors, or anybody else found their way around before the days of radio, inertial, and GPS reference systems when there could be weeks or months when the sun and stars were not visible.
Overcast skies were not the only hindrance to celestial navigation but the persistence of the weather often revealed something about their location. Accurate time is essential to most of the navigation resources in the heavens.
Their power of perception probably rivaled that of birds, insects, fish and animals. I wonder which I'd prefer, the power of their perception or the power of today's technology.
Still, lots of ships were lost at sea or grounded but even today's technology hasn't prevented that.
Shackleton's 800 mile sea jouney for survival is a more contemporary example of remarkable celestial navigation with little more than primitive methods.
4. Henry Worsley, soldier and Antarctic adventurer, died on January 24th, aged 55
Feb 6th 2016 | From the print edition
THE compass did not belong to him. But when he felt it in his trouser pocket—and with every stride of his skis over the Antarctic ice, he felt it—it powered him on. When the light was flat, crevasses lurking and nothing before him but “white darkness”, he remained aware of it, his silent companion. If team morale was low in the tent in the evenings, with socks drying at head-height and the winds hurling outside, he would pass it round. It was not much bigger than an old penny, but alive, spinning and jittering, as excited as he was to be so close to the South Pole. For it had been there before, a century earlier. Inside the lid the owner had scratched his initials: EHS, for
Ernest Henry Shackleton.
On his three expeditions to Antarctica, in 2008-09, 2011-12 and 2015-16, Henry Worsley went equipped with GPS, video cameras, satellite phones, solar panels, energy bars.
No item was more important than the compass. It accompanied him physically only on his first trip, a centenary recreation of Shackleton’s march towards the Pole in 1908-09 which, at 88.23ºS, he had been forced to abandon for weakness and lack of food. On that journey Colonel Worsley took the compass into Shackleton’s hut, from which the trek had started, placing it back among the blankets, boots and golden-syrup tins all perfectly preserved by the dry polar air; and he later also placed it ceremonially at the South Pole, completing what Shackleton had always hoped to do.
Yet there was a Shackleton compass in his head in any case.
The Antarctic, though, turned on him as fiercely as it had ever turned on them. Whiteouts blinded him. Storms kept him pinned in his tent. The sheer scale of the challenge began to daunt him. Day by day, his audio diary for his website stayed chirpy; but the selfies showed a face increasingly exhausted. Eventually, like Shackleton with his “astonishing decision” at 88.23ºS, he had to admit he had “shot his bolt” and, 30 miles from success, could not go on. Unlike his hero, he left it too late, and died in a Chilean hospital.
In a whiteout, he radioed on Day 24,
“one’s head is always bent downwards in reverence to the compass.” It might have been his epitaph.
READ MORE :
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21690006-henry-worsley-soldier-and-antarctic-adventurer-died-january-24th-aged-55-shackletons