Global Warming Shifts the Earth's Poles

ananyo writes "Global warming is changing the location of Earth's geographic poles, according to a study published this week. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, report that increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet — and to a lesser degree, ice loss in other parts of the globe — helped to shift the North Pole several centimeters east each year since 2005. From 1982 to 2005, the pole drifted southeast towards northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 2 milliarcseconds — or roughly 6 centimetres — per year. But in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east towards Greenland at a rate of more than 7 milliarcseconds per year (abstract). The results suggest that tracking polar shifts can serve as a check on current estimates of ice loss. Scientists can locate the north and south poles to within 0.03 milliarcseconds by using Global Positioning System measurements to determine the angle of Earth's spin. When mass is lost in one part of a spinning sphere, its spin axis will tilt directly towards the position of the loss — exactly as the team observed for Greenland."

Comments

Re:Surface Drift Question

[silentcoder]

Right, because the scientists who did the studies didn't know any of those things.
They didn't say polar drift was caused by global warming - they showed that ice-melt from global warming has a significant and measureable impact on polar drift.
They didn't say polar drift is a bad thing either - they said "we can use this data as a check to verify what the satellites are saying".

But we're talking about the head-up-the-rectum dismissal of any and all evidence of the climate-change deniers here so anything goes.