Climate Change Is Messing With More Than Just Glaciers

Melting ice is slowing Earth's spin, tilting its axis
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 17, 2024 9:19 AM CDT
Climate Change Is Messing With Earth's Axis, Core
The Earth as seen from space.   (Getty Images/Cinefootage Visuals)

Not all effects of climate change are visible to the naked eye. According to new research, the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets through global warming is messing with the Earth's axis of rotation and even its core. "You can add Earth's rotation to this list of things humans have completely affected," says Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor of space geodesy at ETH Zurich and author of two new studies, per NBC News. The latest, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds increased water near the equator is slowing the Earth's spin and adding to the length of the day.

Earth's rotation has been slowing for millennia, largely due to the moon's gravitational pull, which causes water to bulge on the sides of the planet. These bulges slow the Earth's spin in a similar way that a figure skater slows in a spin with arms outstretched, adding about 2.3 milliseconds to our days every century, Live Science reports. Currently, climate change is slowing the rotation by another 1.3 milliseconds every century, researchers found. But it could become the biggest influence on Earth's rotation, adding about 2.6 milliseconds to our days every century, by 2100 under the worst climate change scenarios. This could bring the need for the first ever negative leap seconds, where a second of a day is skipped, just like a day in a leap year.

The other study, published Friday in Nature Geoscience, finds Earth's axis of rotation is shifting, too, "making the magnetic poles wobble farther away from the axis every year," per Live Science. Based on a 120-year model of polar motion, the motion of the Earth's axis relative to its crust, the study suggests climate change was likely responsible for 1 meter of change in polar motion over a decade, per NBC. Such a change, if unaccounted for, "could mean a spacecraft misses its target by 100 or 1,000 meters when it reaches Mars," the outlet notes. The shifting rotation "is also changing the dynamics of the Earth's core," Soja says in a release. However, this is "not possible to measure directly," the researcher tells NBC. (More climate change stories.)

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