IN these strange times, it may seem as if the world is spinning off its axis but new research shows it actually is and scientists are pointing to the profound impact of human behaviour on Earth as the cause.

 

The world is spinning off its axis?

The expression, of course, encapsulates a situation that is veering off course, but it seems that in reality, the North and South poles are indeed changing more than usual.

 

How so?

The locations of the poles are not fixed and they instead “wander”, influenced in the past only by natural factors, such as the convection of hot rock deep in the planet, ocean currents and weather patterns.

 

But now?

New research published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters, shows that since the 1990s, as the globe has steadily warmed, melting hundreds of billions of tons of ice into the Earth’s oceans, enough water has been redistributed to cause the direction of the poles to alter.

 

By how much?

The North and South poles have moved about 13 feet since 1980, with melting glaciers accounting for most of the drift since the 1990s. Study co-author Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: “The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s.”

 

And the speed picked up?

In 1995, the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward and the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 also increased about 17 times from the average speed recorded from 1981 to 1995. 

 

It’s not just melting glaciers?

The study also says that as well as the melting ice caused by global warming, the pumping of groundwater has contributed to the shift in Earth's axis by changing the way mass is distributed around the world. 

 

For example?

Humans pump a huge amount of groundwater for purposes such as agriculture - in India alone in 2010, people moved 92 trillion gallons (351 trillion litres) of water from underground reservoirs on to agricultural fields, the researchers stated in their paper.

 

How does it affect us?

Climate scientist, Vincent Humphrey, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland offered insight on the findings, saying “It tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth”, adding that the movement of the axis is not significant enough to impact daily life. He did say, though, that it could change the length of day we experience, but only by milliseconds.

 

It comes as?

Separate research from a study at the University of Toulouse in France, which analysed high-resolution maps of more than 200,000 glaciers from the past two decades to monitor changes, reveals that Earth's glaciers have shrunk by 267 billion tonnes per year since 2000, accounting for up to 21 per cent of rising global sea levels.