Human depletion of groundwater has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than four centimeters per year
The Earth has lost enough groundwater to thirsty humans to measurably tilt the planet’s axis of rotation.
A wobbling of the Earth The tilt of the axis on which any celestial object spins tends to be stable. But small changes can occur when large masses shift location inside a planet and on its surface. “Every mass moving around on the surface of the Earth can change the rotation axis,” says Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University.
Shifts in water masses can cause smaller but still measurable changes in the tilt of Earth’s axis. Until recently, researchers thought that these water-driven effects would be caused mainly by the melting of glaciers and ice caps. But when Seo and his collaborators tried to model the Earth’s water content to account for how much the axis has tilted, they could not fully explain the data.
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