Name: Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows
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Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows

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This article is more than 1 year oldThis article is more than 1 year oldMassive melting of glaciers has tilted the planet’s rotation, showing the impact of human activitiesLast modified on Wed 25 Aug 2021 09.43 EDTThe massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995.Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.“The accelerated decline [in water stored on land] resulting from glacial ice melting is the main driver of the rapid polar drift after the 1990s,” concluded the team, led by Shanshan Deng, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.Gravity data from the Grace satellite, launched in 2002, had been used to link glacial melting to and , both following increases in ice losses. But Deng’s research breaks new ground by extending the link to before the satellite’s launch, showing human activities have been shifting the poles since the 1990s, almost three decades ago.The research, , showed glacial losses accounted for most of the shift, but it is likely that the pumping up of groundwater also contributed to the movements.Groundwater is stored under land but, once pumped up for drinking or agriculture, most eventually flows to sea, redistributing its weight around the world. In the past 50 years, humanity has removed without it being replaced.Vincent Humphrey, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and not involved in the new research said it showed how human activities have redistributed huge amounts of water around the planet: “It tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” However, the movement of the Earth’s axis is not large enough to affect daily life, he said: it could change the length of a day, but only by milliseconds.Prof Jonathan Overpeck, at the University of Arizona, US, that changes to the Earth’s axis highlighted “how real and profoundly large an impact humans are having on the planet”.Some scientists argue that the scale of this impact means a – needs to be declared. Since the mid-20th century, there has been a marked acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the destruction of wildlife and the transformation of land by farming, deforestation and development.

This article is more than 1 year oldThis article is more than 1 year oldMassive melting of glaciers has tilted the planet’s rotation, showing the impact of human activitiesLast modified on Wed 25 Aug 2021 09.43 EDTThe massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes...

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I'm Environment Editor at the Guardian - DMs open

Damian Carrington

TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service.

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows

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