AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
WASHINGTON– Glacial melting due to global warming is likely the cause of a shift in the movement of the poles that occurred in the 1990s.
The locations of the North and South poles aren’t static, unchanging spots on our planet. The axis Earth spins around–or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from–is always moving due to processes scientists don’t completely understand. The way water is distributed on Earth’s surface is one factor that drives the drift.
Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
“The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s,” said Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the new study.
The Earth spins around an axis kind of like a top, explains Vincent Humphrey, a climate scientist at the University of Zurich who was not involved in this research. If the weight of a top is moved around, the spinning top would start to lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other.
Researchers have been able to determine the causes of polar drifts starting from 2002 based on data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint mission by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, launched with twin satellites that year and a follow up mission in 2018. The mission gathered information on how mass is distributed around the planet by measuring uneven changes in gravity at different points.
Previous studies released on the GRACE mission data revealed some of the reasons for later changes in direction. For example, research has determined more recent movements of the North Pole away from Canada and toward Russia to be caused by factors like molten iron in the Earth’s outer core. Other shifts were caused in part by what’s called the terrestrial water storage change, the process by which all the water on land–including frozen water in glaciers and groundwater stored under our continents–is being lost through melting and groundwater pumping.
The authors of the new study believed that this water loss on land contributed to the shifts in the polar drift in the past two decades by changing the way mass is distributed around the world. In particular, they wanted to see if it could also explain changes that occurred in the mid-1990s.
In 1995, the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward. The average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 also increased about 17 times from the average speed recorded from 1981 to 1995.
Now researchers have found a way to wind modern pole tracking analysis backward in time to learn why this drift occurred. The new research calculates the total land water loss in the 1990s before the GRACE mission started.
“The findings offer a clue for studying past climate-driven polar motion,” said Suxia Liu, a hydrologist at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the corresponding author of the new study. “The goal of this project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China is to explore the relationship between the water and polar motion.”
Water loss and polar drift
Using data on glacier loss and estimations of ground water pumping, Liu and her colleagues calculated how the water stored on land changed. They found that the contributions of water loss from the polar regions is the main driver of polar drift, with contributions from water loss in nonpolar regions. Together, all this water loss explained the eastward change in polar drift.
“I think it brings an interesting piece of evidence to this question,” said Humphrey. “It tells you how strong this mass change is–it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.”
Humphrey said the change to the Earth’s axis isn’t large enough that it would affect daily life. It could change the length of day we experience, but only by milliseconds.
The faster ice melting couldn’t entirely explain the shift, Deng said. While they didn’t analyze this specifically, she speculated that the slight gap might be due to activities involving land water storage in non-polar regions, such as unsustainable groundwater pumping for agriculture.
Humphrey said this evidence reveals how much direct human activity can have an impact on changes to the mass of water on land. Their analysis revealed large changes in water mass in areas like California, northern Texas, the region around Beijing and northern India, for example–all areas that have been pumping large amounts of groundwater for agricultural use.
“The ground water contribution is also an important one,” Humphrey said. “Here you have a local water management problem that is picked up by this type of analysis.”
Liu said the research has larger implications for our understanding of land water storage earlier in the 20th century. Researchers have 176 years of data on polar drift. By using some of the methods highlighted by her and her colleagues, it could be possible to use those changes in direction and speed to estimate how much land water was lost in past years.
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Who knew. And here I thought is was the increasing numbers of polar bears and the increasing size of volcanic Iceland.
The Walrus said, apparently.
I think you are wrong. It is more likely to be the massive number of t’rough feeding’ so called climate scientists wandering around up there causing it to tilt! of course they would also be breathing out a lot of CO2.
Most of the Earth’s mass that determines orientation of the rotational axis is well below surface The liquid outer core circulation is continually altered by asymmetricity and differential rotation of inner solid core and it is reflected in the changes of the Earth’s surface magnetic field, which has nothing to do with minuscule surface temperature or ocean level changes.
The North hemisphere’s magnetic field intensity during Maunder Minimum has entered ever increasing bifurcation phase reaching its extreme during the1940 -1980 period, when two extremities (located west of Hudson Bay, Canada and north of lake Baikal, central Siberia, Russia) were about equal in the strength. The bifurcation process may well end by the end of this century since the Canadian extremity has entered third phase of a rapid decline since its peak of 1660s.
Current map of the Earth’s magnetic field intensity
LOL! Even tho’ the WUWT article is about shifts in the celestial, NOT the magnetic axis, you’re truly elegant rebuttal is still 100% spot-on.
Folks seem to forget that those pics showing the removal of 1/4 of the Earth as a bigass 3-D wedgie are just simple models for illustrative purposes, NOT empirically produced from actual raw data (i.e. they’re just the proverbial “Artist’s Rendition”)
Spot On! 🙂
BTW, GNSS (GPS + GLASNOSS) does not “measure” ‘Polar Motion’ (the Annual and Chandler Wobbles of the Earth’s rotational axis)! Yet, those wobbles … are in the GNSS (satellite network) time-series … the phase and spectral power … and that gives us confidence … that they, the Annual and Chandler Wobble … are real! The ancient Egyptian civilization recorded the Nile flooding and grain planting and harvests, very accurately. In those records, you will find, if you are brave, the Lunar Nodal Cycle, about 18.6 years, in our … Ice Age ‘Era’ of Earth! 🙂
I like this graph! –Reg
.02% of Earth’s Mass is Water / Ice
About 90% of the mass of the Earth is composed of the iron–nickel alloy (95% iron) in the core (30%), and the silicon dioxides (c. 33%) and magnesium oxide (c. 27%) in the mantle and crust. Minor contributions are from iron(II) oxide (5%), aluminium oxide (3%) and calcium oxide (2%),[13] besides numerous trace elements (in elementary terms: iron and oxygen c. 32% each, magnesium and silicon c. 15% each, calcium, aluminium and nickel c. 1.5% each). Carbon accounts for 0.03%, water for 0.02%, and the atmosphere for about one part per million
You do have to wonder when the factors surely causing the change are all due to activities the Left thinks we should not be doing. Just the way it’s written up here?
Shirley you’re not suggesting that the AGU is what’s spinning out of control? And the earth is continuing normal cycles?
For example, did you know that the tides are caused by all the non-vegan fat people going to Atlantic & Mediterranean beaches on weekends?
And that, for people above a certain BMI baseline, the EU wants more even redistribution in the directions of travel AND the time spent in designated seas & oceans? On the upside, at least they’re still going to be allowed to live. For now.
No, not really.
Yet.
The way it’s written up seems to be confusing the axial poles with the magnetic poles.
“Climate has shifted the axis of the Earth”
I saw this headline yesterday but did not read the article because I knew I would see it here at WUWT, and here it is!
Now, I’ll go read it.
It could be illustrated very nicely by a picture of a wandering of a pole. But noooo …
The shift in the spin axis might be a few centimeters. Spin axis change is far too small to measure within larger uncertainty. LOD changes are easier to measure (time based), but LOD and spin axis poles are not necessarily correlated. One can change independent of the other.
What they have is a model that says the spin axis pole locations should change based on those mass shifts, but in actual location measurement, they are far too small to actually measure.
Joel,
In the original research article at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL092114 , the authors claim to be able to measure the change, which is a matter of single-digit inches per year.
I’ll check to see whether my wife has a picture of her paternal grandfather. Even before he pulled up roots to head for America, he was reportedly a wandering Pole par excellence.
“Climate has shifted the axis of the Earth” – how high is the BS today!
A$$ deep on a donkey!
If the poles are shifting, will [unionised] pole-dancers demand danger-money?
Auto
Just enquiring . . .
I have a question; Have the Aircraft that made emergency landings on the ice fields in Greenland been exposed from the more than twenty feet of ice and snow the covered them during the seventy-eight years they sat there.
The 2 B-17’s and 6 p-38’s of the lost squadron were around 260 under the surface when finally located in 1981
James what you don’t understand is that because of climate change those planes should have been buried in 5k feet of snow 😉
I was under the impression that, because of the movement in the ice, parts of them had been brought to the surface – which is how they came to be found in the first place.
Sorry Rich, they recovered one of the P-38s in the early 90’S!
Get the book, it”s a fascinating read.
I read the book “The Lost Squadron” and the thing that really was so
amazing was how much snow fell on Greenland at that time in just under
40 years, but nobody cared about the sea level then!
…except for the little problem that, when you look at the numbers, the amount of the total pole shift from glaciers melting is… four meters.
Since the early 1980s.
They try to claim all of the pole shift is from that, but it’s still just four friggin’ meters.
Which is most likely a measurement so far within the margins of error that it’s beyond insignificant … a meaningless token of AGW gibberish.
And its all caused by carbon dioxide.
Shore that’s amazin’ stuff, it is. If only we’d been given the gift of knowin’ all the uses of it … clever as the very dickens. Who’d a thunk it?
It is The God Molecule…
I am certain that the tilting of Guam is related.
Oh, yes … it’s sure to be at the bottom of that too (so to speak). Poor old Hank will never live that down.
You can’t go to poles and locate their precise center within that margin of error. Best you could do is probably +/- a dozen meters or so of the real pole.
Even with GPS uniut in hand, GPS may be good to centimeters over most of the Eartth, but those coordinates that read out are based on a geodetic model of the Earth. At the poles that geodetic model is far less accurate than most of the lower latitudes where bulge and shifts are better mapped in the WGS84 geoid model.
According to the religious tenets of the agu alleged scientists, every time whales migrate between birthing waters to polar feeding grounds, the Earth’s poles wander.
I suppose waterfowl seasonal migrations and when tens of thousands of illegal immigrants march on America’s southern border also affect Earth’s wandering poles.
Isn’t amazing what biased people can simply assume and claim because of their beliefs?
Especially when they claim impossible levels of accuracy for their wandering poles.
Yet, these religious bigots insist their devotional belief that Earth’s wandering poles are due to mankind’s CO₂ emissions. Emissions that are minor when compared to Earth’s natural seasonal cycles.
“I suppose waterfowl seasonal migrations and when tens of thousands of illegal immigrants march on America’s southern border also affect Earth’s wandering poles.”
Yes, we are in danger of tipping over and looking like Uranus if many more illegal aliens come to the U.S. southern border!
If the mass has diminished any significant amount then the sea levels there should be measurably lower there.
First of all Joel, you don’t have to go to the poles to locate the center. You get a high power telescope, point it towards Polaris, and take a long time exposure on a photographic plate. You develop the film, and from the arcs created by the stars, you can find the exact point in sky of center of axis. If you need to be more precise, you get a higher power telescope. No need for GPS.
How is that “exact point in sky of center of axis” correlated with an exact point on the surface of the Earth?
Lovely. And the precision of this method is what? Can you provide the error range for this, also taking into account precession of the earth, please?
Is there ANYTHING ELSE they can fuss about? Anything?
This planet’s axial tilt and rotational shift is something I’ve known about since 8th grade, when it didn’t cause panic attacks manifested by grants money seekers. It’s always been there. ALWAYS. The axis wobbles…. and??????
Glaciers in the Middle East? To quote Click and Clack “Doesn’t anyone screen these calls?”
What – you think that during the last Ice Age (the Big One, plus its shorter after ice-ups), there were no glaciers anywhere but north of the equator? Why wouldn’t there be snow and ice in the Middle East and the Sahara, if modern-day Morocco can have enough snow in the Atlas Mountains to have ski resorts?
Persia’s mountains aren’t just pretty photo subjects: they are tall enough to hold snow when the climate is cold enough for it and wouldn’t that snow melt and flow downward into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and water the plains below? Ditto in the deserts of Africa – there are plenty of pictographs showing lakes and rivers full of fish and land with grazing game animals where it is now mostly discouraged weeds and dry dirt.
Just because it’s desert now, dry and “barren” doesn’t mean that it was always that way.
Once again this doesn’t pass the smell test.
Oh it does pass the smell test: it stinks of overzealous modelling and insignificant actual research.
Even 3-4 meters is insignificant to an unknown number of meters or millimeters on the earth’s surface.
A difference without distinctions.
It feels strange to have been moved from “down under” to “up on top” of the world.
sarc.
That sudden rush of blood to the feet makes me dizzy !!
“ Shanshan Deng, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences”
China propaganda to influence the West to use unreliable and costly green energy.
Wait a minute. The EARTHS MAGNETIC POLES ARE SHIFTING ..LIKE RIGHT NOW THE ” NORTH POLE” IS PRETTY MUCH IN SIBERIA… THIS SHIFT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE…IN FACT CLIMATE CHANGE HAS TO DO WITH ” THE EARTHS MAGNETIC POLES SHIFTING ” OUR PLANET HAS GONE THROUGHT THIS ” POLE SHIFT ” BEFORE… WILL THE AURORA ( NORTHERN LIGHTS) MOVE??? DONT KNOW SCIENTISTS DONT KNOW. BOTH POLES HAVE WANDERED SINCE BEGINNING…THESE MAGNETIC FLIPS HAVE OCCURRED BEFORE..NORTH IS SOUTH AND SOUTH IS NORTH. REVERSAL LEADS TO
((( CLIMATE CHANGE ))) WE ARE MOST LIKELY GOING TO HAVE A POLE FLIP… AN UPCOMING REVERSAL OF OUR POLES… IF WE GET A MAGNETIC POLE REVERSAL THEN FROM STUDIES OF PREVIOUS REVERSALS THE RISK IS HIGH OF INCREASED UV AS A RESULT OF THE OZONE LAYER DAMAGED BY REPEATED SOLAR STORMS WHICH WILL HAPPEN… ALOT OF SUNBLOCK FOLKS. ONE ARTICLE SAIDS THE FOLLOWING : THE RISKS OF SOLAR STORMS ARE ALWAYS PRESENT WETHER ITS MAGNETIC REVERSAL OR NOT . THE MAIN RISK OF A SOLAR STORM IS GPS SATELLITES GLITCHES FOR HOURS AND POWER CUTS. . WHILE CO2 CAUSES HEAT TO BE TRAPPED IN THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE IT ACTUALLY COOLS THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE. RESEARCH ALSO INDICATES THAT RISING CO2 LEVELS HAVE CAUSED THE DENSES PART OF THE IONOSPHERE TO LOWER BY ABOUT 5 KM GLOBALLY. CHANGES IN THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD CAN CAUSE ” MUCH LARGER CHANGES ” . CHANGES CAN CAUSE A WARMING OVER SOME PARTS OF EARTH AND COOLING OVER OTHER PARTS OF EARTH. OVER ANTARCTICA A WARMING UP TO 12 DEGREES …A MAY 2014 ARTICLE ” EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD IS IMPORTANT FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AT HIGH ALTITUDES” BY BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY.
Please stop shouting, Victoria. Calm down. And please read the article again. They are not discussing the MAGNETIC pole. They are claiming the ROTATIONAL pole is drifting. Due to glaciers melting and ground water pumping. Hahahaha!
The Earth’s radius is 3,963 miles at the Equator to 3,950 miles at either pole. The molten rocks inside are much heavier than water. The water from glacial melt and groundwater pumping didn’t leave the planet: it merely moved slightly. The total amount of water shift since 1990, averaged across the globe, has to be less than a millimeter. That miniscule water shift has had no effect on the rotation of the planet. And the “lowering of the Ionosphere” that you wrongly claim to have occurred has even less mass than that.
The American Geophysical Union is a Marxist propaganda outfit. The authors of the study are Communist stooges. NASA is either wrongly cited or they have gone bonkers. You can safely pump your well water without hurtling the Earth into the Sun. Trust me. And get some sleep. You’ll feel better.
They didn’t realise, the number of polar bears, in conrast to griffs belief, is increasing, so a pole shift is to erxpect, isn’t it ?
😀
It’s increasing mass of polar bears which is shifting the rotational pole. That is just how many of them there are now.
Rock is much heavier than water or ice so have they eliminated all of the continent building going on? The Himalayas are getting higher as is known for sure. And there is unbuilding as well. Asia is pulling away from Africa for example and the Atlantic is widening. Seems like a lot to eliminate before blaming global warming.
Beneath that mountain building is a rather large and heavy mantle, that moves! How this affects uncertain Grace measurements, is unknown.
Andes, Alps, Sierras and the Rocky Mountains are also uplifting/rising/growing.
The entire Western America continental plate is being uplifted.
Couple with Earth’s massive highly compressed iron core.
One wonders just how much leverage the agu alleged scientists used for their minor ice movement beliefs?
Based upon their claims, these alleged scientists ignored all of the accreting ice.
These alleged scientists also ignored all of our Solar System’s gravitation effects on Earth’s barycentric center.
The AGU press release is an inaccurate summary of the actual research article. Surprise, surprise! Most of the unsupported propaganda is in the press release.
Don’t forget the soon-to-be-solid, ~1500⁰C magma pouring up from the floor of Atlantic (aka the Mid-Atlantic rift) that’s driving plate tectonics.
And the fact that the Pacific Ocean levels have actually fallen for the last century says that we can eliminate ice melt:
http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70000/IDO70000_60370_SLD.shtml
Spot on my friend, I was thinking about that same thing
as I was reading the article
Time to change the bearings.
Maybe it needs a little axis grease.
Maybe they should lookup the word precession. Turns out the Earth’s axis of spin is constantly changing. You do not need global warming for this – it is already happening.
For something geological, that time period is less than the blink of an eye. If they could say it’s never been this fast in the last million years I’d pay attention.
This reminds me of:
“If they could say it’s never been this fast in the last million years I’d pay attention.”
They could say it, and it would probably be a lie, just like everything to do with climate right now being unprecedented, is a lie.
A fate worse than tie dying.
You mean obliquity, Bob.
April’s fools just keep on giving.
What should annoy us is this was printed, not what it said.
Think of the implications!!! CO2 is not only is the climate control knob but also controls the Polar Drift. It appears we have found the “MASTER MOLECULE” and can manipulate our universe by simply choosing what to burn or not to burn. Our early ancestors were onto something when they made burnt offerings to the Gods, they just didn’t realize that it was coal the gods wanted and not animal or human sacrifices. (lol)
We have reached peak lunacy here. IMHO
On a more serious note, this sounds like a scientific group trying to get on the research grant money gravy train (ie make it rain). It is a well known research community “secret” that if you can link your research to climate change you can greatly improve your chances of funding. And do I ever have stories of that happening and even a first hand experience of losing a grant to a group citing climate change that the agencies jumped all over (but 10 years later nothing has been substantiated, and even worse contradicted). Pulling in a million dollar grant will get you tenure at most major Universties, and as it is the money they care about, whether your research bears fruit or not is immaterial.
“We have reached peak lunacy here. IMHO”
So any rational person would think. Yet as they pass lunacy, they are accelerating!
It’s CO2 wot dunnit
“If the weight of a top is moved around, the spinning top would start to lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other.”
Sort of like Guam might tip over, we may tip over. the whole Earth OMFG! What a bunch of morons.
Note they NEVER say how much the spin axis poles move, but that LOD might change a few milliseconds. Sorry, but LOD and spin axis are only loosely correlated. One can change independent of the other.
.
The title claims climate caused the drift. Yet the researchers admit changes in glacier mass doesn’t account for the change:
“The faster ice melting couldn’t entirely explain the shift, Deng said. While they didn’t analyze this specifically, she speculated that the slight gap might be due to activities involving land water storage in non-polar regions, such as unsustainable groundwater pumping for agriculture.”
All in all, the spin axis might move a few centimeters a decade… At most. Just another attempt to gin up climate scam fear and get funding to keep the research gig going.
And you didn’t add that the rotational WOBBLE is something that has ALWAYS existed (referred to occasionally as Milankovitch cycles) and takes about 25,000 years to make one complete polar circular wobble. And has nothing to do with the magnetic polar shift, either. That’s the earth’s core at work.
Geezo Pete, I knew about this when I was in grade school and the National Geographic wasn’t run by idiotas. Ice has nothing to do with it. You know it. I know it. But they have to excuse their existence by coming up with something so ridiculous that it defies physics.
The earth’s axis wobbles. It has always wobbled. It will wobble and give us a friendly climate to live in, despite recurrent ice ages and desertifications, until the Sun swells up into a red giant and swallows the inner planets.
It used to be the “Earth’s got a fever”! Now it’s “The Earth’s got the colywobbles”! Climate change causes everything.
They don’t have anything else to grab onto, Bruce, so they go for the obvious instead of doing real research. They probably don’t believe that the Himalayas were once ocean bottom, despite recurring finds of ammonites and other fossils there, because continental drift isn’t in their vocabulary.
Well, both the magnetic pole and the rotational pole have been documented over several million years.
But I would place my money($5) on the rotational movement. Milankovitch cycles have been traced back much further than temperatures. They also have more precision since the signal is a much smaller fraction of the changes.
And here I always thought that science people knew about all of that….
I am SO disappointed.
Are they taking this continuing change in the gravitational equipotential into account when they ‘measure’ sea level with tidal gauges and satellites?
Yes, at least they try. They use the huge number of satellite measurements to establish a geolevel map of gravity. That can be used to calculate sea levels and changes.
It doesn’t always agree with established tidal gauges so neither establishes a bullet proof accuracy.
Suffice to say we know that sealevel has risen about 130 meters since 20,000 yearsbeforepresent. The rate of change was .1-.3mm/yr until about 200ybp when it apparently increase to ~10mm/yr. The most recent data also used satellite measurements starting in 1992. While in some ways they are technically more accurate they also don’t match long established tide guages(several hundred years with a limited number of guages). The sea level is affected by many things, but right now the sea level rise is limited by the rate the ice caps melt which is very much smaller than it was at the end of the last ice age 8000 ybp.
Philo,
What I’ve read here, on WUWT, suggests that sea level rise – SLR – is pretty constant, over at least 150 years, at no more than 3mm [0.3 cm] per year.
And probably longer – but error bars going back before about 1875 are probably larger, given the very limited number of tide gauges existing that long ago.
Auto
“In 1995, the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward.”
I seem to recall from high school that the spin axis DEFINES the north pole and from that point all directions are SOUTH. So how do they define a drift to the east?
I wondered about that, and decided they must be correlating direction of shift with meridians of longitude. Thus, a move “down” the meridan at 90 degrees west is a move west, and a move toward Greenwich, England is a move south.
Based on western, white, imperialist, colonial definition of the map.
I have applied to the appropriate authorities to have them cancelled.
Just filling out paper work.
What rhymes with “white supremacy”?
‘Total Anarchy?’
When you lose water, where does it go?
The same place your missing socks go.
And the moon is beginning to crack in half like in Thundar the Barbarian.
I saw this article on another site. It is so bad, it’s very obvious the author has no clue about earth science. But of course, CAGW is about feelings, not science.
Anyone have a back of the envelope calculation of the mass of the total ice on the earth as a fraction of the total mass of the planet? I suspect that fraction is so small that the effects of essentially small changes in total ice mass would have an effect too small to measure with any accuracy.
Certainly, the Ice loss since 1900 from Greenland and Antarctica is insignificant in terms of their respective volumes. (graphs use PIoMAS and Grace data.)
I thought recent papers show east Antarctic increase exceeds west Antarctic decrease for net increase over recent decades
Very tiny amounts either way compared to the total mass.
Graph remains unchanged.
Ralph
The small mass is somewhat compensated for by the long lever arm, since glaciers tend to be at high elevations.
Clyde,
Glaciers also tend – some exceptions – to be in more pole-ward parts – so closer to the axis of rotation.
Might human migration – from tropical regions to cooler climes – also have some un-accounted-for effects?
[Though, I know the total mass of every human alive is less than that of a single cubic kilometre of seawater!].
Auto
Over the years I’ve noticed that the earth wobbles more on late Friday and Saturday nights. Whoda thought it was the ice?
Ice definitely causes the wobbles on Friday and Saturday nights – gotta put something in my cuba libra
Its the Martini – shaken not stirred!
I think the wobble may be caused by the sauce you’re putting on the ice and not the ice itself.
No no no.
he ice melt speeds up when the ice is dropped into the sauce and breathed upon by the drinker. It must be caused by the deific molecule CO₂!
/s
It’s not the ice, it’s what the ice is mixed in!