Reader View from the Solent writes:
Global warming shifts the Earth’s poles. North Pole heads for Greenland
“Global warming is changing the location of Earth’s geographic poles, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters1.
Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, report that increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet — and to a lesser extent, ice loss in other parts of the globe — have helped to shift the North Pole several centimetres east each year since 2005.
“There was a big change,” says geophysicist and lead author Jianli Chen. ”
Between 1982 and 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. (which amounts to 21cm or ~8 1/4″- Anthony)
Scientists have long known that the locations of Earth’s geographic poles are not fixed. Over the course of the year, they shift seasonally as Earth’s distributions of snow, rain and humidity change. “Usually [the shift] is circular, with a wobble,” says Chen.
But underlying the seasonal motion is a yearly motion that is thought to be driven in part by continental drift. It was the change in that motion that caught the attention of Chen and his colleagues, who used data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to determine whether ice loss had shifted and accelerated the yearly polar drift.
GRACE’s twin probes measure changes in Earth’s gravity field, which can be used to track shifts in the distribution of water and ice. Chen’s team used GRACE data to model how melting ice caps affect Earth’s mass distribution. They found that recent accelerated ice loss and associated sea-level rise accounted for more than 90% of the post-2005 polar shift.
More at:
http://www.nature.com/news/polar-wander-linked-to-climate-change-1.12994
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With global warming introducing that extra wobble, it is easy to create a model to project what effect global warming will have on the Earth in the future. /sarc – Anthony
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Great idea. Just took a peek at the WarmList and if the page is correct, it hasn’t been updated for about a year. That’s a shame.
@Anthony … perhaps you might consider contacting them and seeing if you can take over the list here, or just copy it as the core of a new list and let us crowd source for updates? I really can’t think of a better place for it to be located. ( I think the same might go for mirroring the John Daly site as well ).
It’s absolutely jaw dropping. These wild conjectures with nothing (or microscopically small) justifications behind them. I say, let’s just cast goat entrails – probably will prove to be just as accurate. .
“Chen’s team used GRACE data to model how melting ice caps affect Earth’s mass distribution”
I bet they did and they were paid handsomely their amazing effort. Were the models blond or brunette, male or female, or a politically correct balance of both?
sarc.
What about UP? That is a direction. 🙂
It is understood that some shifts in rotational axis alignment with comparison to earth’s exposure to the sun, may occur because of “surface” mass changes, itself a partial result of surface temperatures changes.
However it is more than likely that the axial changes themselves have a primary effect on “global warming” because of the solar incidence relationship with different earth surfaces and this may possibly be contributing more influence than claimed for CO2.
In other words, more likely the other way round – first the rotational axis shift, then the warming/cooling result.
Is this a reasonable hypothesis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole
If asymmetrical redistribution/reduction of the cryosphere caused the axis of rotation to change i would expect there to be an increase in significant earthquakes and a possible increase in awakening volcanoes.
Since the earth is affected by all these nutations;
Perhaps we should encourage our Representatives to submit a bill that would neuter the earth.
It seems that their off to a good start as it is.
Eventually, one of our esteemed would point out that earth is naturally known as “mother” so the appropriate procedure would be a humanectomy.
Ban dihydrogen monoxide today.
It’s for the children!
“””””…..Justthinkin says:
May 15, 2013 at 11:48 am
next you’ll be hearing about how the melting of the glaciers and ice sheets, due to AGW, is slowing down the rotation of the Earth and increasing the rate of AGW.
Well.The Earth’s rotation has slowed down.According to atomic clocks(I want one)The day on earth is…ready….1.7 milliseconds longer than they were a century ago. Must have been all the cow/horse flatulence…….””””””
Well that is no mystery. It is well known that the moon was once much closer to earth than it is now. The days were shorter and the months were shorter.
But as earth rotates under the moon’s gravitational attraction, it pulls out bulges on both sides of the earth, roughly in line with the moon. Well we all know about the tides. There are two bulges, because the water towards the moon sees a higher gravity than does the center of the earth so it bulges towards the moon. On the opposite side of the earth, the water sees lower gravity than the center of the earth, so it bulges away from the moon.
Well just great, we all like the tides. But nobody told the rocks that they were not subject to the moon’s gravity, so the solid surface bulges towards, and away from the moon as well as the water.
Now just imagine if you saw a wave of ground go whistling down your street (East-West) at a thousand miles an hour, twice a day. That might generate a lot of frictional heat, contorting all that solid rock, and it also sets up a torque, trying to stop the earth from rotating by grabbing those love handle wave bulges.
The net result is that the earth loses angular momentum and energy, and the days grow longer. The energy doesn’t vanish; it gets transferred to the moon increasing its angular momentum, and driving the moon to a higher orbit, so it is slowly receding from the earth. Meanwhile exactly the same process is going on , on the moon, so it too, is slowing its “daily” rotation rate, and also watching the earth drift away from it. The effect is mirror image, and angular momentum, is slowly transferred from the body rotation (daily), to orbital rotation of the earth and moon rotating about their common CM.
Scientist can easily measure these minute changes. You have no idea how accurate these atomic clocks are. Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies) used to make, and maybe still does a Cesium beam atomic clock, about the size of a suitcase, that was accurate to a few parts in 10^13.
These were often flown in satellites for relativistic measurements.
At one time, the HP metrology lab, actually maintained TWO Cesium clocks; one tracking NIST time, and the other one tracking the US Naval Observatory time. They were proud of the fact that they had the only commercial product that knew the difference.
One of the two clocks claimed that the universe was one day older than the other one did.
As I recall, when it was decided to fix the problem, and have just one (US) time standard, I believe it was NIST who blinked, and decided the Navy was correct. Dunno whether we lost a day, or gained a day in that deal.
Nowadays, that level of atomic timekeeping is about like using a grandfather clock. The world’s best atomic clocks are so accurate it would blow your mind.
So they probably can tell when you make a U-turn on any east-west road.
If I understand the mechanisms, the planet is going to anomalously start to cool. As most people are aware there has been a sudden anomalous change to the solar magnetic cycle. Normally when the solar magnetic cycle slows down, the planet cools. In this case there is something that is inhibiting the mechanisms that would normally (all else being the same) cause cooling, something is removing ions from the atmosphere.
The something that is removing ions from the atmosphere is also causing the North geomagnetic pole drift velocity to increase from 15 km/year to 60 km/year. The cause of the North geomagnetic pole drift velocity increase is not melting of the Greenland Ice sheet.
If and when there is anomalous cooling I will submit a series of articles explaining the mechanisms and what to expect next.
Concurrent with the sudden acceleration of the North geomagnetic pole drift velocity from 15 km/year to 60 km/year, there is now observed lightning accompanied with volcanic eruptions. (Look at the picture in the attached link.)
There is correlation of past increases in volcanic eruptions (simultaneously in both hemispheres, to explain what is observed a mechanism that can cause an increase in volcanic eruption in both hemispheres and change the geomagnetic field is required) with solar magnetic cycle minimums and with abrupt geomagnetic field changes. A side effect of how the sun causes the geomagnetic field to abruptly change is an increase in volcanic eruptions.
It is odd there is no discussion in the media concerning the South Atlantic geomagnetic field anomaly. This is indication that a geomagnetic excursion is taking place. There is also observational evidence that the geomagnetic excursion is accelerating.
The geomagnetic field specialists have found that there are cyclic abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field. The magnitude of the changes and frequency of the changes cannot be explained by a liquid core change forcing function.
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
Recent palaeomagnetic studies suggest that excursions of the geomagnetic field, during which the intensity drops suddenly by a factor of 5 to 10 and the local direction changes dramatically, are more common than previously expected. The `normal’ state of the geomagnetic field, dominated by an axial dipole, seems to be interrupted every 30 to 100 kyr; it may not therefore be as stable as we thought. …. ….Recent studies suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field has fallen dramatically in magnitude and changed direction repeatedly since the last reversal 700 kyr ago (Langereis et al. 1997; Lund et al. 1998). These important results paint a rather different picture of the long-term behaviour of the field from the conventional one of a steady dipole reversing at random intervals: instead, the field appears to spend up to 20 per cent of its time in a weak, non-dipole state (Lund et al. 1998).
http://www.annalsofgeophysics.eu/index.php/annals/article/view/4631
New geomagnetic field observations in the South Atlantic Anomaly region
The Earth’s magnetic field has a distinct dipolar structure. More than 90% of the field strength at the Earth’s surface can be attributed to an axial dipole currently tilted by approximately 10.2° with respect to the rotation axis. However, the field is anomalously weak in a region centered in the South Atlantic and covering parts of southern Africa and South America. This area, where the field reaches less than 60% of the field strength at comparable latitudes, is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly
(SAA, fig. 1a). It is caused by an increasing patch of opposite magnetic flux compared to the dipole direction at the core-mantle boundary (Bloxham and Gubbins, 1985) and its centre has moved from southern Africa to South America over the last 300 years (Mandea et al., 2007). The local weakening in field intensity allows energetic particles and cosmic rays to penetrate much deeper into the magnetosphere and atmosphere than in other regions, resulting in significant space weather effects such as satellite outages (Heirtzler et al., 2002).
The global dipole strength is currently decreasing at a very high rate (e.g. Gubbins, 1987; Hulot et al., 2002), but the intensity change is distributed non-uniformly over the globe. Mapping the long-term global secular variation from ground observations or the difference between magnetic field models derived from Magsat (1980) and CHAMP satellite data (2000 to present) reveal that in some regions the field intensity is even increasing (fig. 1b). The strongest decrease is observed in the southern African – Southern Atlantic region. Studies of magnetic field distribution at the core-mantle boundary (CMB) have shown that a patch of reverse flux with respect to the dominating dipole direction exists (Gubbins and Bloxham, 1985), which has been growing continuously since it appeared around 1695 (Jackson et al., 2000). Secular variation at the CMB is exceptionally strong beneath southern Africa, exhibiting a pattern of propagating wave-like structures (Dormy and Mandea, 2005).
Lightning Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/photogalleries/volcano-lightning-pictures/
April 14, 2009–Lightning, which often accompanies large eruptions, illuminates a giant ash cloud from Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano, southwest of Anchorage, in a March 28 picture by an amateur astronomer. (See daytime pictures of the Redoubt Volcano eruption.) … ….”We don’t always get lightning [when a volcano erupts],” said Steve McNutt, research professor of volcano seismology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who was involved in the project. “And that’s one of the things we’re trying to figure out.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-ionosphere-drops-to-a-new-low/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215121601.htm
Boundary Between Earth’s Upper Atmosphere And Space Has Moved To Extraordinarily Low Altitudes, NASA Instruments Document
During the first months of CINDI operations the transition between the ionosphere and space was found to be at about 260 miles (420 km) altitude during the nighttime, barely rising above 500 miles (800 km) during the day. These altitudes were extraordinarily low compared with the more typical values of 400 miles (640 km) during the nighttime and 600 miles (960 km) during the day.
The geomagnetic excursions cause the planet to abruptly cool, not insulation at N65 in June and July. An observation to support the assertion that insolation at N65 does not control the glacial/interglacial cycle is recent finding that Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere warm and cool synchronously which is does not make sense as the solar insolation for the two hemispheres is 180 degrees out of phase.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=24476
Glacial Records Depict Ice Age Climate in Synch Worldwide
An answer to the long-standing riddle of whether the Earth’s ice ages occurred simultaneously in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres is emerging from the glacial deposits found in the high desert east of the Andes.
Using a technique to read the changes imposed by cosmic rays – charged, high-energy particles that bombard the Earth from outer space – on atoms found in the mineral quartz, the UW-Madison researchers were able to precisely date a sequence of moraines, ridge-like glacial features composed of an amalgam of rocks, clay, sand and gravel. Their results show that glacial ice in South America reached its apex 22,000 years ago and had begun to disappear by 16,000 years ago.
“We’ve been able to get quite precise ages directly on these glacial deposits,” says Singer, whose specialty is geochronology. “What we found was that the structure of the last South American ice age is indistinguishable from the last major glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere.”… ….What’s more, the group found evidence that the last major glacial period prior to the last ice age, from a time dating to 150,000 years ago, mirrored North American climate for the same period. … …“During the last two times in Earth’s history when glaciation occurred in North America, the Andes also had major glacial periods,” says Kaplan.
The results address a major debate in the scientific community, according to Singer and Kaplan, because they seem to undermine a widely held idea that global redistribution of heat through the oceans is the primary mechanism that drove major climate shifts of the past.
The implications of the new work, say the authors of the study, support a different hypothesis: that rapid cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere synchronized climate change around the globe during each of the last two glacial epochs.
“Because the Earth is oriented in space in such a way that the hemispheres are out of phase in terms of the amount of solar radiation they receive, it is surprising to find that the climate in the Southern Hemisphere cooled off repeatedly during a period when it received its largest dose of solar radiation,” says Singer. “Moreover, this rapid synchronization of atmospheric temperature between the polar hemispheres appears to have occurred during both of the last major ice ages that gripped the Earth.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6341.full
Bipolar correlation of volcanism with millennial climate change
Analyzing data from our optical dust logger, we find that volcanic ash layers from the Siple Dome (Antarctica) borehole are simultaneous (with >99% rejection of the null hypothesis) with the onset of millennium-timescale cooling recorded at Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2; Greenland). These data are the best evidence yet for a causal connection between volcanism and millennial climate change and lead to possibilities of a direct causal relationship. Evidence has been accumulating for decades that volcanic eruptions can perturb climate and possibly affect it on long timescales and that volcanism may respond to climate change. If rapid climate change can induce volcanism, this result could be further evidence of a southern-lead North–South climate asynchrony. Alternatively, a volcanic-forcing viewpoint is of particular interest because of the high correlation and relative timing of the events, and it may involve a scenario in which volcanic ash and sulfate abruptly increase the soluble iron in large surface areas of the nutrient-limited Southern Ocean, stimulate growth of phytoplankton, which enhance volcanic effects on planetary albedo and the global carbon cycle, and trigger northern millennial cooling. Large global temperature swings could be limited by feedback within the volcano–climate system.
So, what has been the effect of the added land ice in Antarctica and why did they ignore it? There’s no way to determine the effect at one pole without understanding what is happening at the other one. Once again we see academia unable to do real science.
So how many centimetres were the poles out of alignment 20 40 60 100 2000 years ago .Has anyone checked.
Latest Climate Change Scare Story.Yeah yeah.
So what’s the latest with Angelina Jolie and Kim Kardasian has she dropped yet.
Leif beat me to it with the first comment of the thread. There is no East from the North Pole.
Let us remember that the 6 gigatons of anthropogenic CO2 per year into the atmosphere, gets pretty heavy over the decades and there is no telling what such a weight couldn’t do.
George E. Smith says:
May 15, 2013 at 11:08 pm
… atomic clocks(I want one) …
… Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies) used to make, and maybe still does a Cesium beam atomic clock, about the size of a suitcase, that was accurate to a few parts in 10^13 …
Your wish is my command, and it’s a hell of a lot smaller than a suitcase:
http://www.symmetricom.com/media/files/downloads/product-datasheets/DS_SA%2045s_CSAC.pdf
“Shepherdfj says:
May 16, 2013 at 9:59 am”
Lets not forget the estimated 40,000 tons of “space dust” that has been falling to earth annually…for ~4.5 billion years.
“””””……Billy Liar says:
May 16, 2013 at 11:17 am
George E. Smith says:
May 15, 2013 at 11:08 pm
… atomic clocks(I want one) …
… Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies) used to make, and maybe still does a Cesium beam atomic clock, about the size of a suitcase, that was accurate to a few parts in 10^13 …
Your wish is my command, and it’s a hell of a lot smaller than a suitcase:…..””””””
Well Billy, I don’t quite know how to break this too you , but in Dec 1964, I built what was the very first commercial test instrument, built entirely of integrated circuits; (Minuteman ICs from Fairchild, and Motorola) a 20 MHz general purpose counter-timer (Monsanto Model 1000). And it had in it, an ordinary quartz crystal oscillator; oven controlled, and that off the shelf crystal oscillator was more accurate than the specs of that gizmo you just put up.
I could have bought a parts in 10^11 crystal, if I had wanted to pay the money.
“””””…..mpainter says:
May 16, 2013 at 7:42 am
Leif beat me to it with the first comment of the thread. There is no East from the North Pole……”””””
And your addition to Leif’s information , is exactly what ??
William Astley says:
May 16, 2013 at 3:50 am
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Thanks for the post, most interesting “food” for mindful digestion.
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@jim G, i did some research on dihydrogen monoxide and am very concerned…MSM and Yahoo need to be informed…
http://www.dhmo.org/msds/MSDS-DHMO-Kemp.pdf
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George E. Smith says:
May 15, 2013 at 11:08 pm
I thought the moon did not spin…learning is living; thanks too.
William Astley says:
May 16, 2013 at 3:50 am
A side effect of how the sun causes the geomagnetic field to abruptly change is an increase in volcanic eruptions.
The Sun does not change the main geomagnetic field generated in the core of the Earth.