Climate Crisis Has Shifted the Earth's Axis (theguardian.com) 143
The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth's axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said. New submitter DickHodgman shares a report: In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions. The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995. Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.
glaciers have been melting since the Younger Dryas (Score:1, Troll)
ended. and the poles shifting has been documented since the 1700's using ship's log books of measurements from that time
Re:glaciers have been melting since the Younger Dr (Score:4, Funny)
i guess you missed the part about the substantial increase to the speed at which the poles are shifting and the direction changing.
that's ok the summary was long and full of medium sized words
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I guess you missed the fact that there is no set time frame on how fast or slow any change of a pole shift happens.
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I cannot tell if you're serious or not.
Re:glaciers have been melting since the Younger Dr (Score:5, Informative)
Xkcd can explain this
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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As you get older you start to go bald. One day you find that clumps of hair are coming out of the head. Don't bother going to the Doctors, because you were going bald anyways, it is just nature. Never mind your water glows in the dark.
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Everyone's going to die eventually, so it's okay if I murder them.
This is an actual rationalization that murders use. That and "People die every day, so what's the big deal?"
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I wonder if humans during the Younger Dryas would know the difference between a torch and a bonfire? But don't worry, there are resources to aid in understanding the difference between Little and Big [youtube.com].
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Given that clarifiction , you are correct.
This conflicts (Score:5, Insightful)
This conflicts with my established political views so it cant be possible, because no one, and i mean NO ONE, knows more about the complex interactions that make the world go round (literally) than my teams politicians!
so the only possible explanation for all this 'evidence' and 'science' is a massive world wide conspiracy between the media, scientists, and the other teams politicians.
yep,... conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of people from all walks of life, agreeing to work together on this massive lie to the entire world, with the ultimate goal of ... profit i guess... that makes the most sense!
Southwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't ANY direction on the North-Pole 'southwards'?
Re:Southwards? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't ANY direction on the North-Pole 'southwards'?
Any movement from the current position is southwards. But they are using the 1980 position as the baseline. So from 1980 to 1995, the pole moved about 4 meters. Since then, the direction of drift has shifted by 90 degrees and the pole is moving east without moving further south from the 1980 position.
1980
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1995 --- 2021
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" But they are using the 1980 position as the baseline. So from 1980 to 1995, the pole moved about 4 meters."
Sure, but it still moves south or north, never east or west.
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Sure, but it still moves south or north, never east or west.
Relative to its current position, the pole can only move south (never north).
Relative to its 1980 position, which is what TFA uses as a baseline, it can move north, east, south, or west.
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But they are using the 1980 position as the baseline.
Good they chose a baseline. It's useful for things that change a lot.
I hope they did not think 1980 was somehow special though. That would be stupid.
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I hope they did not think 1980 was somehow special though. That would be stupid.
Most likely they are using 1980 as the reference because that is when regular accurate measurements began.
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The point is that (for example) Greenwich is no longer (90-52)deg from the Earth's centre of mass on the same bearing as it used to be.
No problem, it will be fixed! (Score:2)
Ho hum. (Score:1, Insightful)
Did the axis shift? Yeah, maybe. Was it caused by glaciers melting? Very very unlikely.
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Re:Ho hum. (Score:4, Insightful)
The paper shows it was caused by glacial (well ice sheet) melting, or didn't you RTFA? If you have a scientific rebuttal to their research, then publish it. Maybe shifting of the poles is not a major issue compared to all of the other impacts of humans on the environment, but it is yet another piece of evidence that we are causing measurable global change. It might also be a good cross-check of historical data.
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The paper shows it was caused by glacial (well ice sheet) melting, or didn't you RTFA?
Maybe you didn't read the actual paper [wiley.com] and simply relied on its interpretation by a Guardian reporter. If you check the paper, the authors say there is some uncertainty about polar ice melting as the cause of polar drift.
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Last line of the paper:
The polar drift in 1995 discovered in this study, along with the polar drift in 2005 and 2012 discovered in previous studies, reinforces the suggestion that âoeterrestrial water storage is the most plausible causal mechanism for the decadalâlike oscillationâ.
This IS nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the moon is the primary cause of the earth's axis-shift - it's why it points 23.5 degrees from the ecliptic and goes around that point every 26,000 years. And 4 meters in over a century is also called measurement noise.
Second, the poster and other climate activists should stop spreading catastrophe porn.
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> Second, the poster and other climate activists should stop spreading catastrophe porn.
You can't expect the religious [hawaiifreepress.com] to not prosthelytize.
Re: This IS nonsense (Score:2)
Oh fuck off, the *one* time you're it tue dishonest nutjobs, and suddenly you masturbate over thinking you are able to call them what you factually are.
Because you have no clue of science or reality *what-so-ever*, and probably are so primitive, you thing the imaginary skydaddy is *actually* a real thing.
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You’re right. Clearly these scientists have wasted years of time and money pouring over the data. All this time all they had to do was post an Ask Slashdot story to get the answer.
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I'm curious. What, pray tell, were they pouring over the data? Old toner cartridges? Whisky? Orange juice?
Oh, you misspelled "poring"! Never mind....
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Is he complaining about the scientists and the study?
Did you not read the post? He's complaining about the hypothesis and methods of the study.
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First of all, the moon is the primary cause of the earth's axis-shift
There's the attack on the hypothesis.
And 4 meters in over a century is also called measurement noise.
There's the attack on methods.
He doesn't have to literally say "In the paper..." to attack the paper.
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"the moon is the primary cause of the earth's axis-shift"
The moon is the primary cause of axial procession, not of shifting the axis relative to the earth itself.
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You're quite right. The primary shift was probably due to collisions with large bodies while the earth and solar system were forming. Thanks for the clarification.
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"The primary shift was probably due to collisions with large bodies while the earth and solar system were forming"
Those are one time events. There haven't been collisions of that size in the last few billion years. They can't be used to explain current and accellerating changes.
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[SELF : flags "Bucko ( 15043 ) as a retarded climate denier who is likely to cause his children to die, miserably.
Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:4, Insightful)
Earthquakes measurably shift the Earth's axis.
Cool that we have the infrastructure to measure it, but not the end of the world.
Panic porn headline is panic porn.
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:5, Informative)
https://datacenter.iers.org/da... [iers.org]
Just to add to other comments here, the typical pole wander is on the order of +/- 10m over a year.
4 meters over 40 years isn't a big number. And if that's the number for the amount of ice shift to date, the bound on a worst case ice age vs worst case waterworld is probably not that big.
Again: this is an irrelevant statistic for anything other than precision geodesy and is absolute dishonest panic porn.
Panic porn (Score:2)
https://datacenter.iers.org/da... [iers.org]
Just to add to other comments here, the typical pole wander is on the order of +/- 10m over a year.
4 meters over 40 years isn't a big number. And if that's the number for the amount of ice shift to date, the bound on a worst case ice age vs worst case waterworld is probably not that big.
Assuming that the +/- 10m over a year is random, the expected deviation from a random normal walk is 6m and change.
Modeled as a coin flip with 1m being heads and -1m being tails, the chances of being 10m over average is 11%, however there is an equal 11% probability of being 10m under average, so the total probability is a bit over 22%.
That's not the right analysis because the random drift is in 2 dimensions (the coin flip is in 1 dimension), but it's an easy back-of-the-envelope for comparison.
Again: this is an irrelevant statistic for anything other than precision geodesy and is absolute dishonest panic porn.
The article
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In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles.
To add to the addition, the Guardian continues to be so sloppy as to be meaningless. Continental drift contributes to the drifting position of the poles as well over very long timescales. Over drastically shorter timescales, the most significant Earth-bound affect on the drifting of the poles is the repeated formation and dissolution of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It has come and gone at last four times in the past 2.5 million years, and every time it forms it induces a fairly drastic wobble in the rotatio
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
Nope. Xpole and Ypole are the physical instantaneous center of rotation.
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
The units of xpole and ypole are seconds of arc and go about .5 arcsec in each direction.
1 arcsec is approx 4.8 microradians so .5 arcsec is about 2.5 microradians.
The radius of the Earth is 6371 km.
6.371 Mm x 2.5 urad = 15 m.
Yeah. I do know what I'm talking about.
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
Yeah...that's a second of longitude. Which is not how xpole and ypole are defined. They're the projection of the pole onto the equatorial plane expessed in angle instead of distance.
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what makes this particular issue so difficult is that there at least two issues to a layman....
because most of us get the info no better than second-hand, usually passed along from a biased source, political or otherwise, I can't be sure of what I'm hearing is complete and/or accurate
and then there's the interpretation of the data.... itself besotted w/ agendas and politics to the point where I'm sure many folks just throw up their hands and say, phukkit, I'll just go along with whatever my party affiliati
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No. Truth is knowable. No matter how much you don't want to know it.
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
As a point of mathematical fact, truth can only be inferred to some level of confidence given sufficient information and a bound on noise.
Further, some truth cannot be inferred because the information is inaccessible or the natural (or adversarial) noise exceeds it by orders of magnitude.
For two examples of the former case, consider the orbit of some planet millions of light years away. Truth exists. The planet has some position and velocity. But the information to infer them may not be accessible here.
Or c
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For two examples of the former case, consider the orbit of some planet millions of light years away. Truth exists. The planet has some position and velocity. But the information to infer them may not be accessible here.
"Truth" can include error bars. The existence of those error bars does not mean you have no idea what's actually happening. You know what's going on is within those error bars.
What you and jm007 are attempting to do is the standard climate-change-denial maneuver these days of pretending it's not possible to know what's going on, because measurements are not 100% perfect. You turned to this when your previous tactic, of insisting there's no possible way to change the climate, stopped being effective.
We kn
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
As a general principle, if the error bars are too large, they are useless. If I gave you my location to within a foot, a mile, or even 100 miles, that may be of some practical use to you. If I told you I was somewhere in the Milky Way, that's useless for almost anything you could think of.
As for climate denial...this is TDS on steroids again. If Trump says the sky is blue, it must be green, observations be damned.
What I am saying very precisely is that a 4 meter shift in the pole or even a 40 meter shift on
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If I told you I was somewhere in the Milky Way, that's useless for almost anything you could think of.
If I'm on Earth, trying to measure something on Earth.
If I'm in some multi-galaxy civilization, you being in the Milky Way can be as relevant as you being in a particular country on Earth.
As for climate denial...this is TDS on steroids again
It's almost like you folks have zero grasp of history. Things didn't start today. This has been an obvious pattern for at least the last 15 years.
What I am saying very precisely is that a 4 meter shift in the pole or even a 40 meter shift on the pole is irrelevant
Only because you don't understand the use of that information.
The effects of a shift in the pole can leave geological evidence. Which means we can use this information to try
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
So, facts become untrue when you don't like the political implication of them
When linguistic tricks are used to justify theft from me as being "science based" then you're damn right I call out the lying and the sloppy thinking. Otherwise, I might just shake my head quietly.
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First, the study did not use this as evidence of a crisis. No need to create a straw man to beat down.
Second, the study corrected for other known causes of pole drift, and then asked, what's the cause of the rest?
It then modeled the effects of ice melting (which they said is difficult because the data for that is not as good as other k
Re: Tiny shift, not a crisis (Score:2)
And that's a fine piece of work that will enable higher accuracy space-based geodesy among other things.
But my objection was to the slashdot headline strongly implying that the secular drift in the mean pole at about 1 m/decade is a crisis. "Climate crisis shifts earth's axis" is a rather catastrophic sounding thing if you don't have context to know that the shift is small and irrelevant to just about anything.
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take another look at my post and up your comprehension level; don't mischaracterize what I say; you're so eager to dismiss others you've skipped over a good-faith question/comment... makes you guilty of the same one-sided agenda pushing that is pointed out by my comment
you feel certain in your assessment and nobody else gets to think about it on their own nor question anything, just take what you say as unassailable truth
fuck you and your tyrannical, oppressive mindset; I think for myself and hope others
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fuck you and your tyrannical, oppressive mindset; I think for myself and hope others will, too
Make sure you drill for and refine your own oil before driving a car. You wouldn't want to trust those scientists that claim the stuff from the Exxon station is just as good.
Once again, truth is knowable. You not liking the truth doesn't change that.
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good lord, now you're just trolling
I gave you a chance to persuade and inform, but all you have is ''... cuz I said so ..." which is no doubt how it was explained to you
too weak for me, but perfect for you
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here's another truth... you've added nothing to the discussion
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Did you think your post attempting to claim truth is not knowable was a contribution?
Four Meters (Score:4, Insightful)
"This is a crisis, the poles have shifted because of Global Warming"
"Four meters."
"It's speeding up!"
"Four meters."
"Why aren't you panicking?"
"FOUR. FRIGGING. METERS. IN FORTY YEARS."
Re:Four Meters (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be an idiot. They're not concerned by the poles shifting. They're showing that the shift in the poles can validate the historical data of ice loss before it was measurable with the GRACE satellites. Ice loss in that period is mostly anecdotal (very few people live permanently on large ice sheets). So the estimation methods are based on images and other marginally reliable techniques, leading to that data being questioned. This shows that the historical data is in line with the observed polar drift, which has already been shown in more recent times to be caused by ice loss, meaning that the data is reliable and can be used in other climate models.
Re: Four Meters (Score:3)
That's cute. Pole wander measurement to the scale of meters requires electronic measurement techniques like GPS or VLBI. Grace launched in the 2000s. Laser geodesy spheres launched in the 1970s. Before then, there were no measurements to comparable precision or accuracy that would let you go into the past beyond what we already have in the can.
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Well, actually,according to the study:
Polar motion, which is the motion of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its crust, has been routinely observed using space geodetic observation techniques for more than a century (Anderle, 1973; Anderle & Beuglass, 1970).
Re: Four Meters (Score:3)
And how pray tell were those measurements made? That is to say what was the accuracy of pre-electronic pole wander measurement?
Glad you asked. It was done with optical telescopes. Which is fine for measuring the angles between stars to sub-arcsecond accuracy, but to measure the rotational axis of the Earth relative to a distant star you need a high accuracy clock and/or a high accuracy mechanical angle measurement.
100 years ago, getting an angle to .1 arcsec that way repeatably, to many distant (that is fai
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when you lead with an insult, you've made making your point that much more difficult
maybe that's not your intention, but true nonetheless
something to think about
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Parent poster insulted our intelligence with their denialist nonsense, so your argument is invalid.
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Let's play "Big Number or Small Number" (Score:2)
Is four meters in forty years a big number or a small number? Is it getting bigger or smaller? You provide no context, you just proceed to the (uninformed) laughter.
https://vesl.jpl.nasa.gov/sea-... [nasa.gov] shows the components relative to each other, and for two time series. You can that the Greenland melt component is big and getting bigger
Four Weeks. Was Re:Four Meters (Score:2)
Already urban heat islands and local micro climate are allowing vermin to winter over more easily, they get more breeding cycles too.
Tulips need six weeks of hard frost, else they don't bloom. Already we have lost, may be a 50 mile wide swath all the way across USA where tulips are gone.
It is going to get a weed or bug that both
What caused the shift? (Score:3)
How did we demonstrate that it was melting ice, and not some other factor, that caused the shift?
Re:What caused the shift? (Score:4, Interesting)
Did the research paper completely ignore the literal planetary size blob of molten iron derping around the inside of the planet? I think they left out valid hypothesis of too many people living in certain areas of the world and body mass shifting things. They noted pumping water out of the ground, but discounted WHY we pump it out of the ground.
Silly meat bags everywhere.
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I look forward to reading your published rebuttal.
It's a "crisis" now? I don't believe you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we have some nuclear power plants built now that global warming is a crisis? It seems to me that whatever problems nuclear fission power might cause is nothing compared to a global crisis. Nuclear power is the lowest CO2 energy source we have and this crisis is from CO2 produced from our energy production. If we can't have nuclear power then how can this be anything close to a crisis.
I'll act like this is a global warming crisis as soon as the world's politicians act like it is a crisis. To me that means saying global warming is more expensive than nuclear power. Global warming is more dangerous than nuclear power. That we have to use all means to lower CO2, even those that in any other circumstance would be considered batshit crazy.
Instead we see Germany closing nuclear power plants while digging for coal. If solar power is cheaper than coal then why the fuck is anyone in the world still digging for coal? I have people say that it would be foolish to not use "free" solar energy. How is solar power any more "free" than coal? To get that solar power we still have to dig in the dirt for silicon, aluminum, and whatever else. That's not free. I guess it is free in that all we have to do is go pick it up. Solar power is not free, it is in fact very expensive. This is especially true at local midnight.
Climate crisis my ass. If this was a crisis then the politicians would be telling the anti-nuclear, anti-environmental, anti-human morons to shut the fuck up, then they'd be building nuclear power plants to save their own ass from this crisis.
That's not saying global warming is not a problem, just that it is not a crisis. If it were a crisis then we'd see government intervention on the level of a world war. They'd be demanding technologies that provide the most energy with the least CO2. That means nuclear power plants providing our electricity. That means nuclear powered ships for moving people and cargo. That means synthesizing carbon neutral fuels for aircraft and other transportation.
Is CO2 from human activity a problem? I believe so. A crisis? Apparently not.
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Some green party people have now realized that nuclear was the solution to the CO2 issue all along. But they get ferociously attacked by the (mostly) upper-class millennial and younger zealots (Fridays for Future et. al), who still think the only way forward is to destroy everything their forebears spent time and energy to construct, without offering any reliable and workable replacements.
It's only a crisis insofar as the government will use it as an excuse to tax us even more, to spend the extra money on "
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As much as 6,000 square foot mansions built out of asbestos are a solution to the homeless problem, sure. Nuclear power is insane and utterly unjustifiable.
Hi, cultist (Score:2)
No. If you believe it's a crisis, you don't have time to far around for decades building new radioactive water heaters when wind and solar can be rolled out in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost - and none of the long term risks and toxic waste management.
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Then why hasn't this happened already? Wind and solar power are not new. This has been a recognized problem for decades. There's been no government policies in the way of wind and solar power, quite the opposite. Wind and solar power have been given every advantage in government polices to replace nuclear power, and have been for decades, and yet nuclear power plants still produce far more power to the grid than wind and solar power.
The reason wind and solar power have not replaced nuclear power is beca
Poland (Score:2)
Let's be honest (Score:2)
What is up to you might be down to someone else.
Who really gives a shit whether the axis of rotation is here? Or over there?
Ultimately it does not matter. Your definition of what the "right temperature is for Earth" is about as non-consequential in our Universe as practically anything I can imagine.
You are so small in the whole scheme of things as to be practically un-measurable on a scale as large as the Universe.
Guam (Score:2)
We're nature too, though, aren't we? (Score:2)
A planetary pathogen, granted... But it's silly to call us "not nature".
Even if this will be the worst extinction event the planet has ever seen (it is already one, but not yet the worst), Earth will move on, life will flourish again, and it most likely will be for the better.
Only 4 metres? (Score:2)
Let me know when it's 20,000m, then I can finally have a winter Xmas.
NASA says otherwise, perhaps (Score:2)
There's been an enormous INCREASE in mass of Antarctica in the last 40 years, might this not affect the axis of rotation?
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g... [nasa.gov]
This sounds to me like nonsense. (Score:2)
The magnetic pole(s) may be gradually shifting, but the center of mass (axis of rotation)?
Sounds to me like “fake news”. [*smirk*]
I call b.s. (Specifically, The Guardian is not a reliable science source, let alone news source. It is a tabloid fishwrap, at best. Caveat emptor.)
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Specifically, The Guardian is not a reliable science source, let alone news source. It is a tabloid fishwrap, at best. Caveat emptor.
Well, it's no Fox News or Epoch Times, but cut them some slack.
South? East???? (Score:2)
> The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995
That statement is a bit wrong. The south pole can never drift south... The north pole can ONLY drift south... Right?
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Re:"Climate Crisis" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea those lower middle class climate scientist know how to milk it don't they. I once saw one driving an expensive used Nissan Leaf! Sure the Oil and Gas industry is willing to pay billions to find solid science that disprove global warming or at least Oil and Gas isn't responsible. But no those greedy climate scientist, will just try to get those grants that barely cover the costs, and risk having all their work tossed out every couple years, and their funding cut, just to keep the lie.
Re:"Climate Crisis" (Score:4, Informative)
But those Scientist seem be be getting a lot less corrupting money, than it seems many of the popular anti-climate change group.
Looking at the money trail, there is far more money in climate denying, grants from big oil and gas companies, Being on politicians nice list, big book deals...
Vs just getting enough money to pay the bills and continue on with your work.
Do I think that the real climate scientist have 0 corruption... No, they need to justify their work and continue to get grants, so they have to publish a lot, and often give preliminary findings which they know may be off, but that is what the people paying the bills are asking for.
So that is where we get in the next 100 years will temperatures rise by 2c or by 7c as they giving results before they have solid ones to give.
Re: "Climate Crisis" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why falsify data on climate change when you can grab that sweet grant money [cbsnews.com] through much easier means? Surely there is far less risk in research grants for the soft sciences than run a con on the hard sciences.
It wouldn't take very many undergrads to run a study on the cultural and dietary changes when introducing an agrarian culture to convenience foods like ketchup or instant ramen. Conspiracy work best the fewer people involved in them, and you can cut a much bigger slice of an smaller pie.
I propose an a
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The "crisis" part was made up by The Guardian, it's not a term used in the paper.
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well I sure screwed up that one:
"Any guesses about how much of the earth tilting and glacial melting is the result of natural, not manmade causes? Approximately zero."
Any guesses about how much of the earth tilting and glacial melting is the result of man-made, not not natural causes? Approximately zero.
There, fixed that for me.
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I did read the article, but unlike you I am not ignorant of the fact that the big movers of the pole are in fact things like earthquakes and shifts of material in the Earth's interior. That fact hasn't changed.
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You are incorrectly conflating the intersection of the rotation axis of the Earth and it's surface, with the intersection of it's magnetic field's "dipole moment" and the geographical surface.
300 years ago, the first digit approximation of a model of the Earth's magnetic field was, as you imply, not terribly wrong. But by 250 years ago, it was known to be an approximation.
Another centuary later, The shape of the field (not just it's orientat