The water we pump moved the geographic North Pole 4cm per year, from the 1990s to 2010
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All the water on our planet is mass. Besides that in the oceans, it is trapped in ice caps, glaciers, aquifers, in the ground. And we continuously change this structure: not only by contributing to the melting of glaciers, but also by pumping water from underground and moving it. Certainly not without consequences. One of these is the modification of the earth’s rotation axis, of about 80 cm in the space of 17 years, directly attributable to the displacement of masses of water on the earth by extraction from the subsoil. This is certified by the analysis published in recent days on the pages of Geophysical Research Letters which compared observations of polar drift with estimates from models that took into account water redistribution.
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The most innovative aspect of the work is in fact this, because, as the researchers recall, it was known that the axis of rotation changed and that water – for example through the melting of glaciers – could contribute. Just a couple of years ago, for example, an article appeared on the pages of the same magazine linking the melting of glaciers (and therefore the redistribution of water) caused by climate change to the shifting of the earth’s axis. This time, however, the scientists have also included the redistribution of groundwater in their calculations. Because, they write, all the mass of water found on Earth, underground, as well as that in artificial reservoirs and in the ground in the form of moisture, can change the Earth’s rotation axis. Not just the glaciers.
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According to what they write, for the period from 1993 to 2010, more than two thousand gigatons of water were pumped from the Earth, equal to the rise of the seas by about 6 mm (this is because the use of terrestrial water reserves contributes to impoverish the earth and to enrich the sea). The researchers therefore compared the real movement of the poles with what would have occurred considering on the one hand only the water from glaciers and ice caps, on the other also the underground water. The estimates coincided with what was observed when those over two thousand tons were considered in the accounts, they explain, confirming the weight of the water coming from the subsoil.
“I am pleased to have found the unexplained cause of the axis of rotation drift, although at the same time, as an Earth dweller and father, I am concerned and surprised to see that groundwater pumping is another source of sea level,” said Ki-Weon Seo of Seoul National University, the lead researcher on the study.
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