![]() To discover the nature of these changes and what drove them the team found a way to ‘wind back’ pole tracking through time, thus calculating land water losses that occurred in the 1990s before GRACE data was available. This change in direction was also accompanied by accelerating drift speed, with speeds recorded between 19 topping speeds recorded from 1981 to 1995 by as much as 17 times. This includes the change from southward drift to eastward drift that occurred in 1995. The mission has also shown how terrestrial water storage change -water lost from the land to the sea through things like glacial melting and groundwater pumping - can cause polar drift shifts.įor their new study, in particular, the authors wanted to see if this phenomenon could explain shifts that occurred in the mid-90s. Previous data released by the missions has allowed researchers to determine the movement of the North Pole away from Canada and towards Russia as a result of shifts in the planet’s molten iron outer core. ![]() Earth Day Call For Recognition of NASA Efforts in Understanding the Earth.Answer to Saving Earth from Global Warming Lie in the Earth Beneath Our Feet.Which Countries are More Vulnerable to Climate Change?.GRACE and GRACE-FO measure how mass is distributed across Earth by monitoring gravitational anomalies. The mission which comprised of two satellites launched in 2002 and was succeeded by a follow-on mission (GRACE-FO) the year after it was decommissioned in 2017. Assessing Polar Drift with GRACEĪssessing polar drift since 2002 has been possible thanks to data provided by NASA and the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). “The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s,” explains 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.ĭeng is one of the authors of the new study detailing the research in the latest edition of the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters. This migration of the poles is called polar wander, and it seems that since the mid-90s the melting of glaciers has redistributed enough water to alter its direction shifting it eastward. Whilst scientists aren’t exactly sure how this happens, one of the prevailing theories regarding the major mechanism behind that drift is how water is distributed across the planet’s surface. And just like with that toy, if the weight is redistributed, the rotational axis shifts. Vincent Humphrey, a climate scientist at the University of Zurich explains that in this respect Earth spins like a child’s top. The axis around which Earth turns and thus the locations of the North and South poles aren’t static, in fact, they move constantly. That is the conclusion of a new study that finds glacial melting has been the cause of movement in the Earth’s poles since the 1990s. The melting of glaciers brought about by global warming could have actually been causing shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation. But, new research shows that these effects could be even more fundamental than we previously knew. The catastrophic effects of climate change on our planet cannot be overstated. New research says that the redistribution of water thanks to glacial melting driven by climate change has been causing the Earth to shift on its axis.
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