Over the past 30 years, drilling for groundwater around the planet has caused the Earth’s poles to drift 80cm away .
For about two decades, humans have been drilling and pumping so much water out of the ground that the poles have shifted by almost a meter, in other words, deflecting the Earth’s axis. This shift is comparable to the polar drift caused by melting ice in Greenland over the same time period.
The Earth’s axis has been shifted due to human activity. (Image: Shutterstock).
“People won’t be aware of Earth’s swaying or drifting,” said Clark Wilson, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who has modeled the drift of the poles.
Because the Earth is not a perfect sphere, it oscillates several meters per year . The poles also drift due to changes in the distribution of mass around the planet, such as the seasonal movement of water.
“There are a number of factors that contribute to polar drift . Drilling groundwater and filling reservoirs, or climate change melting glaciers causing sea levels to rise, all contribute to drift,” explains Wilson.
It is estimated that the amount of groundwater pumped to the surface between 1993 and 2010 was about 2,100 gigatons . According to the modeling results, the polar regions are drifted by about 80 cm because this amount of groundwater is displaced from the ground to the surface. Large aquifers located at mid-latitudes have the greatest influence on polar drift. This is why drilling and pumping groundwater strongly influences polar location, Wilson explains.
The team says this has no specific consequences for changes in the length of days or seasons, but that the exact position of the Earth’s axis changes will affect how GPS technologies work. motion.
This finding shows just how much water humans have pumped, said Manoochehr Shirzaei, a researcher at Virginia Tech. “The exact number doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that the mass is so huge that it can affect the polar drift of the Earth,” Shirzaei said.
The expert further noted that humans are pumping more groundwater in the 21st century, in response to droughts caused by climate change, and to grow more crops in dry places.