Last week in many news feeds there was a fascinating story about how the North Pole is moving due to changes in the distribution of weight around the world from melting ice. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab scientists showed that the axis of rotation around which the Earth spins is moving towards the east (I do wonder how you can go east when you are at the North Pole, but that’s another question) as polar ice melts and water on land gets redistributed under depletion of aquifers due to irrigation and changes in reservoir storage as well as changes in climate conditions. Here are some stories you can read about this phenomenon.
The Guardian has a nice one-minute video explaining the study here.
NASA explains the study in depth at their feature page at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-study-solves-two-mysteries-about-wobbling-earth.
Gizmodo explains more about the effects of changing water storage on the earth’s surface here.
According to the Huffington Post here, the changes are not expected to have a significant impact on local incoming solar radiation but it does show that changes in climate can have noticeable effects even on large scales.
