As polar ice melts, water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth bulkier and rotate slower.
Updated: 17 minutes agoNASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera captured this image of the moon and Earth on July 16, 2015. in how Earth moves in space? It turns out we’re changing how our very planet rotates - and it’s affecting the length of our days.
“Climate change is melting so much ice that we can see a huge impact on the very way how the planet is spinning,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the two papers.A melting iceberg drifts due to high temperatures in Scoresby Fjord near Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland. heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s.
But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.” The slowdown from melting ice “could become the new dominant factor, surpassing the moon, which for billions of years shaped the Earth’s rotation,” Soja said. Earth spins on an imaginary line from the North and South poles, but the line isn’t fixed. The points where the axis of rotation meets Earth’s surface drifts and wobbles a few inches per year and several meters every century.
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