Earth shifted on its axis5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() Humans pump an incredible amount of groundwater for agriculture. 7 ways Earth changes in the blink of an eye 10 steamy signs that climate change is accelerating "atching distribution of the hotpots of the change of the TWS, they related to popular groundwater pumping regions," Liu wrote in an email to Live Science. Like climate change, these shifts in water distribution were human-caused. Ice melt from the polar regions explained most of the polar drift, the researchers reported March 22 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters the rest was explained by water loss from nonpolar regions. The second scenario, which accounted for ice melt, better matched what really happened with polar drift, Liu and her colleagues found. In the second, the researchers took into account observations of ice melt during the earlier period. In the first scenario, the changes in water distribution around the world between 19 were similar to what was recorded by GRACE between 20. Liu and her colleagues used the real-world observations of how the poles shifted in the 1990s and created two possible global water-distribution scenarios to see which best explained the changes. Researchers knew that polar drift shifted eastward in 1995 and that it sped up by 17 times between 19 compared with 1981 to 1995. In 2013, for example, researchers reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that rapid melt of the ice in Greenland had caused an eastward shift of the North Pole around 2005.įiguring out what caused polar shifts before 2002, though, required creativity. It was clear that ice melt, driven by climate change, was having an influence. GRACE's precise measurements allowed geoscientists to break down the various causes of polar shifts in the post-2002 era. In 2002, NASA and the German Aerospace Center launched the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which used measurements of Earth's gravity field to monitor changes in ice, liquid water and Earth's crust. Earth's axis shifts for a lot of reasons, ranging from long-term changes in the heat-driven process of convection within the mantle to annual changes in ocean currents and winds. ![]()
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