Loss Of Polar Ice Has Shifted Earth's Axis About Four Meters Since 1980

[hatrack]

The 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.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/climate-crisis-has-shifted-the-earths-axis-study-shows

[Blues Heron]

1. no wonder all the volcaonoes are popping off lately

It's not nice to mess with mother nature!

[Backseat Driver]

2. I remember watching a documentary on television

in which an Inuk who lived near the Artic Circle described that the sun's location when rising and at sundown had changed, messing with his long-learned intuitive navigational skills while hunting; those events were no longer observed as occurring at the same place along the horizon...(Chilling crickets from the narrator of the documentary) at this observation. Was he correct - yes!

I too have noticed what seems to be a different position of sundown on the horizon and that the sun-puddles on the floor are in a slightly different location on the floor as the sun climbs and comes through the transom windows. The full moon also seems to shine squarely through one of those windows at night; and that wasn't so in earlier years. (I've lived in this apartment townhouse since about 2007 and I live much further south of the Artic Circle).

Maybe I'm a little late reading this article, but it's the first one I've read that scientifically verifies the Inuit peoples' claim and my own weird observation. Here's another...

https://watchers.news/2015/03/08/inuit-elders-tell-nasa-earth-axis-shifted/