The North Pole could wander nearly 27 meters by the end of the century
As ice sheets melt and ocean mass gets redistributed around the planet, Earth's geographic North and South poles could shift up to 27 meters by 2100 as the planet's axis of rotation changes. The shift could affect satellite and spacecraft navigation, the researchers said.
Recent studies have suggested that melting ice sheets and glaciers could also affect this mass distribution and shift Earth's poles. In the new study, researchers at ETH Zurich used both the movement of the poles from 1900 to 2018 and projections of ice sheet melt to predict how far the poles might move under different human-caused climate change scenarios.
The North Pole could shift westward by more than 27 meters by 2100 under the worst-case greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the team found. Under a more optimistic emissions scenario, the pole could still shift as much as 12 m relative to its location in 1900.
Meltwater from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets played the largest role in the simulations, followed by glacier melt.
A shift in Earth's rotational axis could disrupt satellite and spacecraft navigation. Scientists map a spacecraft's location in part using Earth's rotation axis as a reference. If that axis shifts over time, it could become harder to pinpoint the spacecraft's exact location.
Future work could involve examining paleoclimate data to determine how much the poles have shifted over millions of years during past episodes of natural climate change. This would help reveal the true scale of human impact on the poles' movement.
Source: Live Science
