UPSC GS PAPER I: Salient features of World’s Physical Geography.

Context: Melting glaciers due to climate change caused Earth’s axis to shift since mid-90s

• The drift happened as the melting glaciers redistributed water, which made the direction of the polar wander turn and accelerate.
• The latest research has that the Earth's North and South poles have moved since the mid-1900s.
• They have been affected due to the melting of glaciers and other factors caused by humans, namely climate change.
• The rapid melting of glaciers has also affected the rotation of Earth.
• This study was conducted by researchers from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
• Melting glaciers due to climate change caused Earths axis to shift since mid90s.
• The drift happened in the mid-1990s as the melting glaciers redistributed water which made the direction of the polar wander turn and accelerate.
• The new study uses data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and observations from the 2018 project GRACE-FO to explain the drift in the Earth’s axis due to glacier melting.

Polar wandering

• It is the migration of the magnetic poles over Earth’s surface through geologic time.
• Polar wander is the motion of a pole in relation to some reference frame.
• It can be used, for example, to measure the degree to which Earth's magnetic poles have been observed to move relative to the Earth's rotation axis.
• It is also possible to use continents as reference and observe the relative motion of the magnetic pole relative to the different continents; by doing so, the relative motion of those two continents to each other can be observed over geologic time as

https://www.firstpost.com/science/melting-glaciers-due-to-climate-change-caused-earths-axis-to-shift-since-mid-90s-9573721.html

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