The analysis showed major changes in water mass in places like northern India, which pumps huge amounts of groundwater for use in agriculture. “This is very much related to the rapid melting of glaciers that is most probably due to climate change.”Ī secondary - but nonetheless significant - reason for the change, according to the research, is the pumping of groundwater from underwater reservoirs, and its subsequent re-distribution across the world’s surface. “There is a close relationship between the rapid decrease of terrestrial water storage and the shift of polar drift,” says Professor Suxia Liu, a hydrologist at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the corresponding author of the research article. Their findings showed how water loss in both polar and non-polar regions was the main reason for a dramatic eastward movement of the poles that took place in the mid-1990s. Using data on glacier loss and estimations of groundwater pumping, a team of scientists calculated how the water stored on land has changed over time. But research published in 2021 shook up understandings of polar motion by demonstrating that man-made climate change has been having an impact for longer than anyone previously thought. Scientists have known for several years that climate change was behind shifts in the earth’s axis of rotation following analysis of data acquired from the GRACE satellites launched in 2002. “The new polar wander is sort of like the canary in the coal mine,” says Erik Ivins, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. The power of climate change to cause such a significant shift in how the earth’s axis of spin moves offers a glimpse of the enormous consequences that could follow from sea-level rise, water depletion, and ecosystem destruction. But the emergence of global warming in recent decades has added a new and unpredictable dimension to this age-old process. ![]() The planet’s geographic north and south poles have always wandered in response to changing ocean currents and the convection of molten rock in the earth’s core - a phenomenon known as ‘polar motion’. As temperatures rise, melting ice has re-distributed water across the earth’s surface, causing the angle of rotation to shift. But climate change is already responsible for fundamental shifts that include altering the axis around which the earth spins. To get to the bottom of it, researchers from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in China and the Technical University of Denmark pulled satellite data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft and studied this “true polar wander” phenomenon during a specific period of time in the 1990s.The consequences of climate change are so huge it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the scale of what will unfold. This axis has also slightly shifted over time, but scientists haven’t been able to exactly figure out why. ![]() Earth’s other kind of pole is the axis around which the planet physically spins. The north and south magnetic poles, which affect things like navigation, drift and even switch places back and forth over time. Let’s nerd out over it together.Įarth has two kinds of poles. Whoops, we accidentally made the planet move: New research says human-caused climate change has accelerated the rate at which Earth’s rotational axis changes. Regions like Alaska and the Himalayas have experienced the most glacial melting. ![]()
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