Has shifted earth axis driver#

Shifts in the geographic location of Earth’s North and South poles is called polar drift, or true polar wander. The average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 also increased about 17 times from the average speed recorded from 1981 to 1995. In 1995, the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward. In particular, they wanted to see if it could also explain changes that occurred in the mid-1990s. The authors of the new study believed that this water loss on land contributed to the shifts in the polar drift in the past two decades by changing the way mass is distributed around the world. Other shifts were caused in part by what’s called the terrestrial water storage change, the process by which all the water on land-including frozen water in glaciers and groundwater stored under our continents-is being lost through melting and groundwater pumping.

For example, research has determined more recent movements of the North Pole away from Canada and toward Russia to be caused by factors like molten iron in the Earth’s outer core. Previous studies released on the GRACE mission data revealed some of the reasons for later changes in direction. The mission gathered information on how mass is distributed around the planet by measuring uneven changes in gravity at different points.

Researchers have been able to determine the causes of polar drifts starting from 2002 based on data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint mission by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, launched with twin satellites that year and a follow up mission in 2018. Credit: Deng et al (2021) Geophysical Research Letters/AGU Inset graphs plot the change in glacier mass (black) and the calculated change in water on land (blue) in the regions of largest influence. Color intensity on the map shows where changes in water stored on land (mostly as ice) had the strongest effect on the movement of the poles from April 2004 to June 2020.

Has shifted earth axis driver#

Melting of glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, the Southern Andes, Antarctica, the Caucasus and the Middle East accelerated in the mid-90s, becoming the main driver pushing Earth’s poles into a sudden and rapid drift toward 26☎ at a rate of 3.28 millimeters (0.129 inches) per year. The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other. If the weight of a top is moved around, the spinning top would start to lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The Earth spins around an axis kind of like a top, explains Vincent Humphrey, a climate scientist at the University of Zurich who was not involved in this research.

“The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s,” said Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the new study. Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences. The way water is distributed on Earth’s surface is one factor that drives the drift. The axis Earth spins around-or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from-is always moving due to processes scientists don’t completely understand. The locations of the North and South poles aren’t static, unchanging spots on our planet.