Something strange is happening to our planet. Around the year 2000, the North rotational pole started migrating eastward at a vigorous clip. Now, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have figured out what’s going on—and you’ll be shocked to learn that humans are behind it.
The rotational axis of any planet, including our own, is in constant flux. That’s because planets aren’t perfect spheres, but bumpy, pitted things whose mass is always on the move. “If you take a chunk of material from some area, you are breaking the symmetry, and the spin axis starts moving,” Surendra Adhikari of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Gizmodo.
Through careful observations and mathematical models, Adhikari has discovered that our planet’s recent polar wanderlust has two causes: the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and changes in the global distribution of water stored on land. Both of these are related to a single underlying phenomenon.
“The bottom line is that climate change is driving the motion of the polar axis,” Adhikari said. His findings are published in Science Advances today.
By Maddie Stone, Gizmodo, SouthFloridaReporter.com, April 10, 2016
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