The melting of Greenland and Antarctica is changing the Earth's rotation

[TexasTowelie]

Sophisticated new gravity research suggests that changes in Earth's climate may actually be having a stunning geophysical effect: slightly moving the location of the planet's spin axis, or axis of daily rotation. In other words, even as the Earth spins on its axis in a west to east direction, completing a full rotation every 24 hours, that axis itself is also moving. This, in turn, means that the physical North and South poles are actually shifting, with the North Pole now drifting towards England.

And given that much of this is related to the loss of polar ice, a changing climate would appear to be at least partly - although perhaps not wholly - responsible. "If we lose mass from the Greenland ice sheet, we are essentially putting mass elsewhere. And as we redistribute the mass, the spin axis tends to find a new direction. And that's what we mean by polar motion," said Surendra Adhikari, a researcher with Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who conducted the work with his colleague Erik Ivins. The new research appeared Friday in Science Advances.

Ivins emphasizes that the study doesn't explicitly attribute the motion of the pole to human caused climate change - noting that "the word human is not in this paper." The study wasn't aimed at attribution of the causes of mass loss – it merely observed them using NASA's twin GRACE satellites, which measure gravitational changes at the Earth's surface, and tied that to polar motion.

At the same time, however, much research has suggested that the warming of the Earth is behind considerable polar ice mass, not only in Greenland and Antarctica, but also smaller glaciers around the world. NASA research, for instance, finds that Greenland is losing 287 billion tons of ice per year, while Antarctica is losing 134 billion tons.

Read more: http://www.sunherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article70882447.html

[RobertEarl]

1. Here we go!

Out of balance and one day it will re-balance. This could be a bad thing, no?

[hollysmom]

3. can it change our orbit?

[RobertEarl]

4. I doubt it

But hey, that would be interesting. It's already not in a true circle... more egg shaped.

Remember the reports from the Alaskan Inuits telling NASA the sun had changed position in their skies? Look like they were not kidding.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

6. ...

[Thor_MN]

14. No. The mass of the earth does not change in this,

so the orbit does not change.

This is about the Earth rotating, not about the Earth going around the Sun.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

2. hillary with help from kissinger will fix this

lol

[Peace Patriot]

5. uh-h-h-h-h...

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. 16 to 18 cm per year

So, in a century, it would have moved 16 to 18 metres. This is not a world-changing amount.

[ish of the hammer]

8. Says some random guy not named Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

It,s the earth and it's changing, so it's earth changing.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. No, says the study

How much difference do you think 16 to 18 metres in the location of the poles would make to anything? It's not going to affect the climate for any point on Earth in any way.

The rate of rotation will also change slightly, and that would have a trivial effect for humans - after a century, another 1.7 milliseconds per day. Which is about two thirds of a second per year, so we'll need frequent leap seconds. But, again, it's just a small effect in precise human measurement, not something that will change anything in climate or biology.

[ish of the hammer]

11. Tides and Plate tectonics come to mind immediately.

the Permian extinction was thought to have been at least partially caused by massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia.
a mere earthquake - brought about by the change in weight distribution or the tiny, little, itty bitty, change in the wobble could kill
millions. a major fault line runs through San Onofre Nuclear facility. Fukashima?
small or large changes in tides can and does affect millions of people.
with over 7 billion people living today almost any change has the potential to affect millions.
if there's one thing the ongoing climate disaster should have taught you is that everything on earth is interconnected and
until you know, nothing is trivial.

but whatever, I don't want to live in interesting times.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. But the change in where the axis it is not about movements of plates, or tides

It's about the movement in space of the whole planet.

Now, the removal of an ice cap does affect the ground below due to the removal of weight, and that might potentially affect a fault line. But that's not about the direction of the earth's axis.

[ish of the hammer]

13. It's a change, it's the earth, by definition, it's earth changing.

you don't know what those changes will be, neither do I and neither do the scientists, yet.
bye

[Thor_MN]

15. No, it is not not "It's about the movement in space of the whole planet."

It's about the rotation of the planet, not movement in space. The orbit of Earth is not affected in any way.

Redistribute mass from high latitudes to the equator and it will slow the rate of spin (but not much).

The plates all have momentum as the globe spins. Change the spin and the plates will feel that. The changing of axis is due to conservation of momentum and the plates will certainly feel changes. Enough to make any difference? Probably not, but there will be changes in strain along fault lines.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Rotation is movement

Yes, the rate of spin will slow down ever so slightly (I was the one who linked to that). By 0.000002%. That is not going to change the strain; the absence of a couple of km of ice above some areas will be much more significant.

[Thor_MN]

17. Rotation is movement, but not "in space".

Movement in space doesn't matter in this regard.

Because physics, changing the spin of the planet will change the strain on faults, not by much, which I pointed out.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. Of course it's in space. It's in three dimensions.

The axis of rotation is a vector. Rotation is a movement in space. A point on the surface moves in space.

But if you're thinking of "movement in the near vacuum surrounding the earth", well, it still is.

[Thor_MN]

19. "in space" implies beyond the planet's atmosphere.

Generally meaning the solar system and beyond. From the frame of reference of the planet, which planetary rotation necessarily invokes, "movement in space" is irrelevant.

The only part where your comment was wrong is by saying "in space". If the planet's axis shifted all the way to the equator, it would not affect (to any meaningful measure) the planet's "movement in space", i.e. the orbit around the sun would be unaffected.

I'm not telling you anything you probably don't know, I'm telling people who don't know, but would get that impression from your comment, that no, the orbit remains the same.

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. space:

speɪs
noun
1.
a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied.
"a table took up much of the space"
synonyms: room, expanse, extent, capacity, area, volume, spaciousness, scope, latitude, expansion, margin, leeway, play, clearance; More
2.
the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move.
"the work gives the sense of a journey in space and time"

Notice the lack of 'atmosphere' or 'planet' in that definition.

If I'd meant to talk about the orbit, I would have. What I was pointing out was that a change in the axis of rotation of the earth does not mean that the parts of the surface are moved relative to each other; it's a change of how the entire earth rotates - in space.

[Thor_MN]

21. Notice the lack of "in" as in "in space"

Let it go. You implied movement of the entire planet, though space. Everyone is wrong now and then.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. No, I didn't imply it; you infered it

because you didn't look at the context (ie the post it was replying to).

'In' is a normal preposition to use when talking about 3 dimensional space, eg:

To examine this issue, the activity of neurons in M1 was recorded in a monkey trained to perform a task that dissociates three major variables of wrist movement: muscle activity, direction of movement at the wrist joint, and direction of movement in space.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10497133

I just want you to understand that the English language can have more than one meaning for a word, and that you shouldn'ty restrict yourself to just the first meaning you as a reader think of.

[Thor_MN]

23. You said it, not me. "movement is space" is not interpreted by most people

as rotation around an axis. You probably did not mean to give the impression, but an unfortunate choice of words lead to it.

You should not restrict your thinking to what you meant to say, and consider what you did say, from the viewpoint of others.

I can see that you apparently have trouble conceiving that anything you say could possibly be wrong. Maybe this will help, it wasn't technically wrong, but easily could lead others to draw the wrong conclusion. It needed clarification.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. Yes, that does help. It wasn't wrong

though 'the wrong conclusion' wouldn't, in any way, have actually mattered. The point is that it's not about plate movements relative to each other, that the previous post had talked about; it's about the orientation of the earth's axis in three dimensions, relative to objects not attached to the earth. I used 'space' instead of those last 10 words in that sentence.

[Thor_MN]

25. If one placed a ball on a table and asked people to move it in space,

how many would simply spin the ball?

[muriel_volestrangler]

26. That doesn't mean that rotation is not movement.

You yourself already agreed 'rotation is movement' - #17.

[Thor_MN]

27. You were technically correct by the same percentage as the percentage of people that spin the ball.

Since I perceive that to be a small percentage, I clarified.

It has nothing to do with rotation being movement, it is about what people think "movement in space" is.

Feel free to try to justify your poor choice of words another time, I'm done.

[former9thward]

28. Tyson says there is a good chance this is just a simulaiton.

Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/

Do you buy that crackpot theory?

[Scuba]

10. It is, by definition, a world-changing amount.

[0rganism]

29. you're setting your timeline too short

a century isn't a whole lot in geologic time; if precession continued at this rate for 10000 years we'd see a 1.6+ km change, and humans (or whatever replaces us) will notice the difference.

of course, whether the slow-on-human-time-scale precession amounts to anything discernible to us beyond the climate change effects we're already seeing is up in the air, so to speak.

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. Without GPS, how would you notice a 1.6km difference in where the pole is?

On a 40,000km circumference of the Earth, that's 0.00004 of the circumference - or 0.0144 degrees. Do you really think that difference in the height of the Sun above the horizon would make a noticeable difference to us? That being 1.6km closer, or further away, from a pole, is something that would be noticeable over 10,000 years, compared to the climate changes we're undergoing because of temperature or rainfall?

The British comma butterfly has moved 137 miles northward in the past two decades, while geometrid moths on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo have shifted uphill by 59 metres in 42 years. The quiver tree of southern Africa is increasing as it moves towards the south pole, but dying of heat and water stress in its shrinking northern range. Dartford warblers have been steadily moving northwards in the UK while declining on the southern edge of their range in Spain.

In the seas, rising numbers of warm-water crustaceans have been found around Norway's polar islands, while the snow crab has extended its range northwards by up to 311 miles. The IPCC report warns that many species will be unable to move fast enough to track suitable climates, with plants, amphibians and small mammals in flat landscapes or that remain close to their breeding site particularly vulnerable.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/31/ipcc-climate-report-wildlife-impact

[0rganism]

31. so you don't think our descendants will have something like GPS?

that's a fair speculation, as far as i'm concerned. could go either way -- maybe the bulk of the population moves off-planet, maybe we reduce ourselves to a pre-industrial society, who's to say? it's a long way out, either case they won't care.

i did make an assumption about the rate of precession remaining constant over 10,000 years. definite opening for criticism there.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. No, I'm saying that a change of that amount in the pole wouldn't affect everyday life

and that's why this isn't 'world-changing'. As everyday people, we now have GPS devices that would be able to measure the change, but you couldn't tell the difference just by looking around you - 1.6km difference in north/south climate can't be detected by a person. Astronomers with good telescopes and time-keeping could measure it too - maybe an ocean navigator with a sextant and chronometer could detect the 1.6km too (but not the 16 to 18m).

[roamer65]

32. As the ice melts, the water will head to the equatorial regions.

The spin of the Earth is much like a centrifuge. If the Earth ever stopped rotating, much of the extreme northern and southern land masses would be deluged as the oceans equilibrate. You would also see new dry land appear in the equatorial latitudes.
As we melt the ice, the equatorial regions should see the greatest rise in sea levels. The poles will no doubt react to the change in the center of gravity.

[yourpaljoey]

35. something to ponder

[Jeffersons Ghost]

33. K&R and it's even worse than that...

[4sure w/ satellite intelligence]