Yes, you read that right. It has been found out in recent research that the earth’s axis is indeed shifting due to climate change. Let us see what we know about till now and what points the research has put forward.
Axis and poles
Earth’s axis of rotation which depends on the north and south poles is not fixed. They periodically change their position but this has been accelerated due to human intervention. The position of poles mainly depends upon the mass distribution inside the earth’s core and also on the surface.
As the earth rotates on its ever-changing axis, we imagine two points on the earth which are the outer extensions of the axis. These two points are called the north and south poles.
Normal shifting
Earth has settled into this pattern of shifting in the last 20 million years and pole reversal occurs every 200,000 to 300,000 years. The last flipping of poles happened around 40,000 B.C. So, we get to know that this shifting phenomenon was normal but due to some causes this has become something to worry about.
The abnormal change
Experts have found that the direction of the poles moved from southward to eastward in the mid-1990s. The shocking thing was that the speed of the drift between 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than it was in the years between 1981 and 1995.
This rapid speed of change is a cause of worry because it will play a huge impact on the season distribution and climate of a place. We have already seen massive hurricanes and other destructive climate episodes during these recent years due to climate change.
Role of climate change
We got to know that the change in the mass distribution of the earth causes the shift in axis. The major role here is climate change. Due to man’s intervention, global warming has occurred which has resulted in a huge loss of glaciers in the world.
Global loss of ice has increased from approximately 760 billion tons per year in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons annually since 2010. This massive change in the distribution of water mass has caused a change in the total mass distribution of the earth. It is high time now that we do something to save our world.
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