When we think of effects of climate change we are reminded of drought, the increase of some meteorological phenomena (such as hurricanes) or the rise in sea levels. But no one, until now, had ever thought about the shift of the earth’s axis. This hypothesis was launched by a new study conducted by a group of experts led by Dr Shanshan Deng, a member of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Why climate change is shifting the earth’s axis
Before talking about the research results, a premise is necessary. The geographic poles are the meeting points of the earth’s rotation axis with the surface of the Earth, and are not fixed: if they move, the earth’s axis also moves. According to previous studies, only natural factors such as ocean currents and heat from the Earth’s core were able to contribute to the axis shift. The experts led by Dr. Deng, observing satellite data collected in the last thirty years or so, however, have discovered something new. Since the last decade of the last century, the fall of
hundreds of billions of tons of ice in the oceans (one of the effects of global warming) has allowed the poles to move in new directions.
A new geological era
The poles, according to the results, began moving from South to East in 1995. Furthermore, the average speed of the polar shift from 1995 to 2020 was
17 times higher than in the 1981-1995 period. Since 1980, the position of the poles has changed by about 4 meters. The research paper states that the melting of glaciers, and the consequent increase in water masses in the oceans, was the main driver of the polar shift that started in the mid-1990s. At the moment, the movement of the earth’s axis is not evident enough to affect our daily life: at most it could change the duration of a day, but only by a few milliseconds. The change in the length of days can be one of the long-term consequences of the shift of the Earth’s axis. Some scientists argue that this phenomenon is yet another demonstration that we have now entered a new geological era:
the Anthropocene. It is a proposal of a geological era based on the fact that man, with his activities, has managed to affect the geological processes, activated by the territorial and climatic changes of the last decades.
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