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Humans Are Causing the Earth To Wobble More Than It Should, NASA Finds (bgr.com)
Iwastheone shares a report from BGR: When looking at the Earth from afar it appears to be a perfect sphere, but that actually isn't the case. Because Earth isn't uniform on all sides due to land masses that shift and change over time, our planet actually wobbles a bit when it spins. Now, a new study by researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several universities and science centers has pinpointed the causes of Earth's imperfect spin, called "polar motion," and they found that humans are contributing to it. The researchers used a wealth of data gathered over 100 years to build mathematical models to trace the causes of the wobble and found that three factors are at play, and mankind is responsible for one of them. Two of the three factors identified by the scientists are glacial rebound and mantle convection. Glacial rebound happens when thick ice sheets physically push down on land masses, compressing them, but then release that pressure upon melting. The land then balloons back up over time, causing Earth's spin to wobble as if slightly off-axis. The effects of the last ice age, which would have compressed a huge amount of land across many continents, is still being felt today in the form of glacial rebound.
Mantle convection, the other uncontrollable factor in Earth's wobble, relates to our planet's inner workings. The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet. The researchers believe these currents also contribute to the planet's imperfect spin. The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities. The researchers estimate that Greenland has lost roughly 7,500 gigatons, or 7,500,000,000,000 metric tons of ice due to global warming. All that ice loss has happened in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas production has been cited as the primary culprit. Losing all that mass has caused a significant shift on the planet and has contributed to the wobble as well.
Mantle convection, the other uncontrollable factor in Earth's wobble, relates to our planet's inner workings. The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet. The researchers believe these currents also contribute to the planet's imperfect spin. The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities. The researchers estimate that Greenland has lost roughly 7,500 gigatons, or 7,500,000,000,000 metric tons of ice due to global warming. All that ice loss has happened in the 20th century, and greenhouse gas production has been cited as the primary culprit. Losing all that mass has caused a significant shift on the planet and has contributed to the wobble as well.
I knew global warming had to be in there somewhere. By the way, it is "climate change" not "global warming". You need to keep updated with the latest propaganda. Meanwhile, your local drinking water is polluted, but go ahead and worry about the Earth wobbling.
The plates on Earth's surface are in constant flux due to the movement of liquid rock far beneath our feet.
In terms of the Earth's radius, the liquid rock is not that far. It's close. It's so close. So scarily, scarily close!
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
These are the same "scientists" who tell us global warming is real and that evolution is a "fact". And then they wonder why no one beleves them.
I blame it on Weebles.
Table-ized A.I.
Two of the three factors identified by the scientists are glacial rebound and mantle convection. Glacial rebound happens when thick ice sheets physically push down on land masses, compressing them, but then release that pressure upon melting.
Soooo they are all over India's plan to artificially drag a massive ice sheet and melt it for water, right?
Yeah.. didn't think so.
Which song are you talking about?
Sounds like Rep. Johnson was on (to) something!
They're too busy beating their slaves anyways.
"Wobble" implies some sort of cyclic shift of the Earth's geographic axis. But they seem to be describing a simple change.
Interestingly, searching for a map showing any such change to the geographic pole produces, well, not much. It seems to be all about the magnetic pole.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So... acknowledgment that we're still coming out of the last ice age (you know, warming), but (and in the very next breath, mind you) blaming (in its entirety) this warming solely on human activity. How fucking stupid do they think we are? ...
sig: sauer
are the high levels of obesity in the US causing the wobble?
Yo mamma so fat, she makes the earth wobble more than it should.
We all know that's the real cause.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The earth is “several million degrees at 2 kilometers or so down” because of humans.
Fuck yeah, Earth sandwich
and think of creimer's fat ass?
Can't we have both clean drinking water AND no global warming? Or do we get drinking water, only from glaciers melted by greenhouse effect?
You know that its not propaganda, its empirical objectively observed data,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
If you want to refer to the general trend upwards, feel free to call it "global warming", if you want to refer to the increased chaotic variance, call it "climate change", if you want to refer to the cause call it "greenhouse effect"...
But you want to ignore the data, so why not call it "la la la I'm not listening" .
Be wary of weasel words like 'contributes to' because they can be misleading yet technically correct (not always the best kind). In particular, if a contributor is responsible for a negligible portion.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I guess your family live in my fridge? Because you didn't state even their location, let alone a 100 year graph.
IMHO, climate scientists build all these models and collect all this data, and you don't even quote a single fact to support your argument, or even float a hypothesis as to how your family's house is representative of the worlds climate.... so if its all the same, I'll trust the scientists. Because their mechanisms stand up to basic fact checking, and yours don't even quote facts to check.
And last I heard the evidence that humans are causing global climate change is still quite inconclusive.
I see that you got a troll mod. Not surprising, given the strong liberal bias on this site.
Just have like everyone in China jump up and down at the same time for a while. If the wobble gets worse, have everyone in North America jump up and down for a longer period of time.
Once everyone can see global warming was fraud, global wobbling will be the next scam from the academic-industrial complex.
Interesting there was no mention that humans have probably slowed the rotation of the earth in the past few centuries. Humans have built things up, call buildings, and and built dams trapping water, also further from the center of the earth. The later factor is the major one. Think angular momentum. Most slashdoters will have this, but for those who don't, an iceskater spinning around will spin slower if they move their arms out away from the center.
The amount of slowing is very tiny. The speed of the earths rotation is tracked by NASA and other entities. Quite useful if you are communicating with a satellite in the outer solar system. The loss off rotational speed jives with calculations of how much water humans have been keeping up in dams.
It's all because of Windows 10 updates, nothing to be concerned about!!!
What, did it escape into space or something?
Because otherwise, regardless of its form, all of that mass is still here, on earth.
Seriously.... the principles of conservation of matter and energy is like grade 5 or 6 science class stuff.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I would consider their third factor as a subset of glacial rebound.
Maybe if they try hard enough, they could link man-made global warming to mantle convection and have a total of 4 factors.
They could split the human-caused portion into 7.6B "factors" and we could just go after the worst humans.
It's just me. I'm sorry, I've really let myself go. -SOB- It is my fat ass that is screwing with the Earth and making it wobble... In fact, I really shouhlsdf be eating thssh icgh cream uddr the cicumshtahnches but ish jush sho goog...
"The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas"
That affecting the "wobbling" is possible. But the loss of ice - melting and going into oceans - should make earth wobble less, as oceans are more equally distributed on earth than blocks of ice.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I blame this "double-step" music that's apparently all the rage nowadays - it's known for its "wobble".
and then, causation of correlation. You're welcome.
It's a pretty convincing hoax too. China has invested trillions into renewables and cleaner tech.
Well that's virtue signalling in its most literal, technical (signalling theory) meaning then.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Said the agency that is testing rockets. Close NASA down.
Ice is lighter than water but it's all concentrated in one spot... Water seeks its own level, so once it melts into the ocean, it tends to flow around the planet eh? So if anything were to hold true, it's that the spin ought to become less wobbly because there's less mass concentrated in one spot...
What a bunch of hogwash. I call B.S. on this article lol.
...when such clowns wandered around wearing sandwich boards with 'The End is Nigh!' written on them. Nowadays we pay them a living with our taxes.
Yeah.. We only have to dig 3000 km to arrive at liquid rock. That's like 0.0001% of Earth's ~6000 km radius. Right?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Whoooooooooosh!
Was it from when they had that experiment to get millions of people to jump in the air all at the same time?
Get out your bag of popcorn folks and grab a soda, the astroturfers are on stage again! What are they gonna give us today? "It's not man made"? "It doensn't happen"? Or are we going to be entertained by a new conspiracy theory around the evil scientist that gets rich from wanting to change our way of life?
Anyhow, we know it's gonna be a blast! Let the show begin!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Stop wobbling everyone, you're making the Earth wobble. Stop it! I boted her. #shewon
Now where's my purple hair dye.
we just need a coordinated effort among all the people in the world.
At 1:00pm EST everyone is to jump up and down. This will solve the problem!!! It will put back the weeble in the wobble and we won't fall down.
I hope it's because of all the fucking.
One Hundred million dead last century in the quest for "Justice and Equality".
So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action
And THAT is why you are not believed. People aren't stupid. When you claim that Florida will be under water in 20 years, and it isn't, then people will rightly think you are nothing more thana Left Wing activist pushing an agenda.
I have observed that when you put a heavy solid object on a spinning object, such as a washing machine, it throws it off balance and makes it wobble.
I have also observed that if the washing machine is full of water, in the spin cycle the water self- balances. It's not off balance and doesn't wobble because the water automatically centers around the center of the spin.
Helicopter rotors use the same effect to self-balance, allowing each blade to move a bit relative to the others. When they can move, they self-balance.
I wonder if these researchers have ever washed their own clothes and seen that solids can throw the balance off, while liquids do not. Put a chunk of ice in the spin cycle and it'll wobble. Melt the ice into water and it won't wobble.
Did the Earth wobble more before the ice age compacted the surface? What's the correct amount of wobble? What's the best temperature for the planet? Who gets to decide all of this?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The NASA's website in the link doesn't say anything about humans. Just glacial rebound, convection and water mass redistribution (mainly from Greenland). So what on Earth???
Glacial rebound means the Crust is rising, as a result land will rebound higher than current sea level leaving plenty of room for all the melted ice. Such immaculate design!
Joke aside, have the Global Warming "scientists" taken into account glacial rebound with relation to their flood models?
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
"...The third and final factor identified by the scientists is the massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas, which is the direct result of global warming thanks to human activities...."
Yes, no begged questions there at ALL.
Perhaps the title could have been better formed as "Since we're all believing that THIS spike in temps - comparable in frequency and size to the last 20 times this has happened over the previous 3 million years - happens to be caused by humans, we're going to blame everything on humans.
No, this is not just humans thinking they're the center of the universe as they have since Aristotle."
-Styopa
Al Gore reported yesterday that the dangers of global wobble were now dire, with the danger of Earth whirling out of its orbit and falling in to the sun becoming more and more likely. Human activity is entirely responsible for this situation and the only cure for it is enormous taxes on the developed nations, who move around more than the rest of the world and, of course, have lots of money. Gore has formed a wobble bank that will be selling wobble credits to rich people so that they can assuage their consciences over causing this terrible situation.
"Glacial rebound"...
"Mantle convection"...
"massive loss of ice on Greenland and other areas"...
That's two causes. Two.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Is there anything they can't or didn't do?
I read articles about this more than thirty years ago, about how the concentration of water in damns, mostly in the northern hemisphere, was changing the rotation. SSDD
Humans should make more Weebles.
Bullshit. Climate change is a natural function of our planet and is not caused by humans. Fake news will brainwash you every time.
Stop global warming! Stop global wobbling!
the causes are multi-variant, not human induced.
I, for one, welcome our new Wobblpocolypse overlords!
Kim Kardashian's ass for the wobble.
Just another day in Paradise
Itâ(TM)s funny that they keep pointing to Greenland as the poster child for melting ice. If only they looked at more current information:
http://polarportal.dk/en/nyheder/arkiv/nyheder/end-of-the-smb-season-summary-2017/
Letâ(TM)s keep watching and see what happens over the next 5 years. If Greenland gains more ice is anthropogenic global âoewarmingâ causing that too?
Troll here
I think it's just the number of fat people in the US
Climate change has become like a bad "as seen on tv" product where some coked up asshat just keeps adding on to the pile of worthless nonsense with another "but wait, there's more". Next they'll tell us climate change is responsible for Bill Cosby raping women.
It's all those goddamn fat hoes in Yakima, WA that's causing the Earth's eccentric & wobbly rotation.
"I am certain that the world is hurtling ever closer to the Sun, overbalanced as it is on one side by the overbreeding of the fecund Hindoo, but at present there is little I can do about it." ( https://www.theonion.com/my-su... )
Another one not mentioned is the massive weight of water for when we create MASSIVE dams such as 3 gorges, Kariba Dam, Bratsk Dam, etc. In fact, the biggest ones have had plenty of earthquakes associated with them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
At least five times since the formation of the earth, because of changes in global climate, the polar ice has expanded north and south toward the equator and has stayed there for at least a million years. The earliest of these known ice ages was some two billion years ago, during the Huronian epoch of the Precambrian era. The most recent ice age began about 1.7 million years in the Pleistocene epoch. It was characterized by a number of fluctuations in North polar ice, some of which expanded over much of modern North America and Europe, covered up to half of the existing continents, and measured as much as 1.8 mi (3 km) deep in some places. These glacial expansions locked up even more water, dropping sea levels worldwide by more than 300 ft (100 m). Animal species that had adapted to cold weather, like the mammoth, thrived in the polar conditions of the Pleistocene glaciations, and their ranges stretched south into what is now the southern United States.
http://science.jrank.org/pages/5371/Polar-Ice-Caps-Polar-ice-caps-geologic-history.html
The mass changes distribution, which was the whole point of the article, ya maroon!
Much Fail. So Sad.
There, I just skipped all of the bullshit and blabber, and got to the point everyone seems to be trying to make.
http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.u...
Huh? Why? Where is it?
Need Mercedes parts ?
The ice sheet on Greenland is, on average 7,005 ft thick. Greenland's ice sheet is 660,000 sq miles. Ice weighs 57.3 lbs/ft^3. A back of the envelope calculation shows that the 1.5 X 10^16 lbs of ice mentioned in the article amounts to about 2.62 X 10^14 cubic feet of ice, or a cube 63,970 feet on a side. Or, 4,092,160,900 sq ft X 9.13 = 37,369,811,959 sq ft, or 1,340 sq mi.
0.20% of the total ice covering Greenland.
WWII fighter aircraft crash landing on Iceland were found 46 years later buried 260 feet deep. That amounts to an average ice layer of 5.7 feet per year, which is 0.08% of the 7,005 feet of ice cover.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
They don't believe humans melted the ice with CO2 or anything else more than a few percent at most. The magnetic field around the planet is 90% of the issue. It's a fairly new conspiracy theory that's making the rounds of the internet and is related to the doomsday videos about pole shifts. These guys claim that z pinch zones in the magnetic fields cause air and water currents to move to new positions causing the climate shifts. Furthermore the specific z pinch areas, which have rotary motion, cause air systems to swirl which cause hurricanes, tornadoes, and arctic blasts in weird locations or with weird movement patterns. There's been a resurgence of legit scientific study regarding the mag field as a whole since we have better satellites, better sensors, and a pretty damned good map of the field. Since it's kind of frontier science (like plasma physics), crazies can make all kinds of assumptions and claims with little proof from actual studies to refute them.
I'm not quire sure what point you're getting at.
Were the melt rate remotely constant, it'd be safe to say that Greenland's glacier will take hundreds of years to melt. Unfortunately, the rate of glacier thinning is increasing rapidly.
While I may never need to worry about the actual sea level rise, there are entire nations whose country will be gone within my grandchildren's lifetime. Thousands of cities will have to deal with the same problem.
As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day. Civilizations that persist have one thing in common: They plan ahead and sacrifice the "now" for the sake of future generations.
The model has three parts, with the last one being the stuff unaccounted for by the first two. Let's add hype by labeling it "anthropocentric".