Geometric North Pole?

Just got ITV News on in the background, with a report about a couple guys travelling without leaving a carbon footprint from, and I quote, the "Geometric North Pole" to the "Geometric South Pole".

Since a Google for those terms results in 56 and 6 matches respectively (I did wonder if it was just some odd term they hadn't covered in GCSE Geography), is it safe to assume that someone screwed up? I thought it was just whassername reading it wrong, but they had it on the graphics too

David

Wikipedia is good in this instance. I'm not that up on my Geography, however if I remember correctly, there is the magnetic north; North Magnetic Pole ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Magnetic_Pole) and True North (or Geometrically North - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_North).

The magnetic North and True North are about 500km apart this year.

More general info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole

You're thinking of the Geographic North Pole there, which must be something different as the ITN map showed, for instance, the Geometric South Pole to be somewhere off the coast of Antarctica - the geographic poles are where you'd expect them to be at the top and bottom of the globe. I'd never heard of this 'geometric' term either.

Incidentally, that 'true north' wiki page you kinked to doesn't exist!

I was similarly confused by the term "geometric" north/south pole because they didn't seem to be in the same locations as "true" north/south.

The "top and bottom of the globe" in terms of the orbital plane of the planet are not fixed points on the surface because we rotate around the "true poles" which are at an angle

The "geometric south pole" shown on the ITV News map has no meaning. These guys appear to have picked two random points to travel between just for a laugh.