/sarc;
Well, sort of…
They do not claim we are going to fall off. I added that bit. (Hey, the Warmistas make shit up and scream death and damnation over a splinter in their paw, so why can’t we?)
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160408-climate-change-shifts-earth-poles-water-loss/
Yes, it’s true. The National Geographic has said so. The rotational poles of the Earth are being moved by CO2. No doubt about it. The earth is going to wobble and wobble and then fall right over.
Climate Change Is Moving the North Pole
By Brian Clark HowardPUBLISHED April 8, 2016
Yes, I double checked the date. That’s April EIGHT not April FIRST.
Finding the North Pole means traveling north, right?
Thus begins this mighty tome of deep thinking…
One is left to wonder if the North Pole is moving what happens to the South Pole, but it would seem that Nat. Geo. doesn’t care about the southern hemisphere anymore. After all, all the interesting people and places are in the North where they are located and the south is mostly water and ice and stuff. Besides, nobody they know goes there anymore. Sure it was interesting in the 1800’s when there was no internet porn and pictures of native black women dancing gave them a tingle up their leg, but that was then and this is now. Unless bouncing black bosoms is caused by “Climate Change”, it’s not going to make the pages. (Hmmmm…. wonder if a photo essay on how “Global Warming” is causing less and less clothing… just sayin’… )
Yes, but with a slight caveat: Earth’s northern pole is drifting rapidly eastward, and it looks like climate change is to blame. The discovery may have major implications for studies of ice loss and drought, potentially improving our ability to predict such changes in the future.
Yes indeedy do. It’s that nasty ol’ “Climate Change” shoving the North Pole around and being a bully again. Shoving it East. (You folks in the UK better watch out. Get your Santa House ready ’cause the Pole is a commin’!
Earth turns around an axis like a giant spinning top. The places where that invisible axis intersects with the planet's surface are the north and south rotational poles. Due to Earth's wobble on its axis, these spots drift in roughly decade-long cycles. (All this motion is a completely separate mechanism from the behavior of the planet's magnetic poles, which also reverse periodically over the course of millions of years.)
As ice melts and aquifers are drained, Earth's distribution of mass is changing—and with it the position of the planet's spin axis.
Scientists pinpoint the geographic north and south poles by taking the long-term averages of those rotational positions.
Explorers and scientists have been reliably measuring the precise positions of the rotational poles since 1899, first by measuring the relative positions of the stars and then by using satellite telemetry. Over the past century or so, the poles have tended to wander by just a few centimeters a year.
"That may seem like a tiny variation, but there is very important information embedded in that," says Surendra Adhikari, an Earth scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The north pole had shifted back and forth from east to west, with on overall trend that had it moving toward Canada. But since 2000, the pole’s typical drift has “made a dramatic change,” says Adhikari. Since that time, the pole has been moving steadily eastward by about 75 degrees, heading toward the Prime Meridian that runs through Greenwich, England.
Well, at least they discovered the South Pole at last and tied the two together. Though one wonders just which direction is East to West AT the North Pole?
BUT all you folks in England, you are in just so much in a world of hurt. The Pole is COMING and headed straight for Greenwich, England. NASA says so.
This shift has been on the order of 10 centimeters a year, so it’s probably not enough to warrant a recalculation of the planet’s geographic pole–although later generations may have to consider it if things keep changing, notes Adhikari.
What’s most exciting to the scientists is that they can now explain what’s actually causing the drift, and that may have significant ramifications on climate science.
Oh, wait, 4 INCHES a year. AND it has been since 2000 so 17 whole years. Why, that’s a wopping 68 inches. 5.6 feet. Out of about 24,901 miles of circumference. Golly. AND we know what’s causing it. No, not the same things that have caused the pole to wander around for millions of years. Not the gravity of the Moon, nor the Sun, nor the perturbations of the planets. NONE of those things that have made the planet nutate, bob, and wobbly forever. Nope, not at all. Now it simply must be cow farts and car exhaust.
One wonders if they have “done the math” to plot the actual planetary forces involved with enough precision to know.
But the physics are so complex that scientists could only guess at how this actually works in the real world.
So that would be a “No” then…
Well. Guess they’ll have to make something up that gets headlines and more grant money. let’s call it a “secret” and then we can be like Indiana Jones and find it in the “secret” cave…
Now, Adhikari has proposed a way to explain the process. The secret was discovering that it’s not just shrinking glaciers that change Earth’s mass distribution, as some scientists had thought. A lot of mass also gets moved around due to large-scale loss of liquid water from the land, the team reports this week in Science Advances.
Adhikari and his colleague and co-author Erik Ivins think the rotational pole is shifting toward Europe because there has been a massive loss of water from lakes and aquifers in Eurasia, around the Caspian Sea, and in India. Warmer temperatures overall have led to more evaporation and less precipitation in many areas, and booming human populations have been sucking up groundwater from reservoirs and wells (watch Saudi Arabia get drained dry).
Yes, you heard it there first. The Saudi Arabian DESERT is getting dry.
Oh, and they seem to be unconcerned about all the aquifer draining in North America that would be a counter balance to the Eurasia bit. While here in California that’s all we hear about. How we are destroying the planet by sucking all the water out of the USA.
But at least all the Warmista True Believers can invite him to the parties now.
“What we have shown is that melting ice and a pattern of continental water storage are combining to cause a dramatic shift in the direction of the pole,” says Adhikari.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, commends the authors for adding to the discussion about climate science. Schmidt, who was not affiliated with the study, agrees that human activity has caused “detectable shifts in mass from ice sheet melt and groundwater extraction.”
You tell him, Gavin! He done good by tying in “Climate Change” to irrigation water. Never mind being “not affiliated”. He’s got an invite in the mail to join the “We’re All GOING TO DIE!!!” (and CO2 is the reason) club.
Not only that, it’s going to be better than 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything!
Pole Predictions
Adhikari and Ivins hope their findings will help other climate researchers improve our understanding of global forces.
“We should be able to use polar-motion data to answer some interesting questions,” says Adhikari. The data could help make climate models more accurate, because scientists could work backwards from the robust archive on polar drift to infer the melting and evaporation rates of the past.
“We have much better data on the position of the poles than we do on melting glaciers through history,” Adhikari notes.
Scientists might similarly be able to track how fast specific areas have dried out from drought. The end result could be more accurate predictions of changes in climate in the future, as well as a better understanding of how our planet spins through space.
Yes siree, we don’t have the ability to do the math to actually get it right (per their own statement) but now we can use a nice story about “Climate Change” to tune models and find hidden droughts in the past. Golly.
So much speculation and fantasy drawn from 4 inches a year…
In Conclusion
So, what data do they have on spin axis shift over the 1800 year lunar drift up and down? Did they allow for all the gigatons of sea water sloshing about and how tides change over centuries? How much about what happens when the sun is in a ‘trefoil’ motion from the rest of the planets interacting gravity? Have they really solved the multi-body math for the entire solar system to actually know the future rotation of the Earth? Have they allowed for changes of the ‘electric universe’ homopolar motor effects?
But never mind… Just know that the UK is in the cross-hairs. Your up for being the next North Pole. And it’s all the Arab’s fault. (Hey, they said it, not me. Burning Arabian oil and pumping the Arabian desert dry.) So go feel guilty and send them grant money. They deserve it for cooking up a yarn like that.
Musings from the Chiefio 
George Frederick Dodwell, South Australian Astronomer
He also conducted a magnetic survey of South Australia. “This led on to his study of latitude variations which was held in conjunction with La Plata Observatory in Argentina, the International Latitude Congress and the International Astronomical Association. In September of 1922 he led a combined party with Sir Kerr Grant of Adelaide University to observe and photograph the total solar eclipse from Cordillo Downs, Australia, to test Einstein’s theory of the effect of gravitation on light.”
“The study of latitude variations led George Dodwell to investigate the Obliquity of the Ecliptic (the tilt of the earth’s axis). This work commenced in 1934, a year after his uncle, Sir Frank Dyson, K.B.E., F.R.S., had retired as Astronomer Royal in England. An ancient manuscript by a Medieval Belgian astronomer Godefroid Wendelin, containing observations of the Obliquity, was published in 1933 and was obtained by Dodwell. The entire data set revealed a progressive and one-sided abnormality compared with Newcomb’s Formula.”
“He concluded that there was consistent evidence that the tilt of the earth’s rotational axis was altered around 2345 BC. This view supported those that have claimed that the poles shifted within the memory of man, possibly as a result of a close encounter or impact with an extra-terrestrial body such as a comet. Some have gone further and attribute the destruction of Atlantis to this clash.”
http://www.setterfield.org/dodwell_manuscript_1.html
I gave up on NatGeo a couple decades ago.
Tampa airport knew about this 5 years before the NG report.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1344899/Shift-magnetic-north-pole-affects–Tampa-airport.html
@Oldbrew:
That’s the magnetic pole shift. This NASA guy is talking about physical north pole shift. (Though since both are moving I wonder what they use for their survey marker… / datum…)
@Soronel:
I only read them on line for free and then only for eye-roll comedy relief…
@Graeme No3:
There are recorded chronicles that claim to report the shifting of the starts. Not enough to pin it down to details but enough to lead some of us to think our orientation is not as stable as asserted.
I’m pretty sure, for example, a bit rock from space hitting with the right direction and impact point would not only mess up the biosphere over a large area, but could act as the ‘little bump’ that causes a top to wobble wildly when it hits one, then returns to stable.
The hard part is finding evidence of a very rapid thing like that in a geologic record.
It didn’t need to be rapid, just enough to resonate.
If I recall correctly, the 2011 earthquake off Japan was supposed to have shortened the day slightly, as well as shifting the rotational axis, slightly. I wonder if that event was the bulk of the change since 2000?
EM – the wobble only happens to a spinning top because it’s held by gravity to the table. A collision of something with the Earth would simply produce a step change in angular momentum and direction if the Earth was solid. No wobbles. The Earth however isn’t solid, but has (probably) liquid between a solid core and the mantle. This would make the angular momentum of the mantle change quickly and then this would have a drag on the fluid layers which would provide a slower change back towards the original angular momentum (though not of course reaching it) as the core catches up with the step-change of the mantle. Again, no wobbles but a gradual settling down of the system as all the angular momenta tend towards pointing in the same direction.
That “conservation of angular momentum” problem has always seemed at odds with the known wobble of the axis of the Earth. Internally, I would expect the Earth to be a damped system (outer layer we live on, viscous molten stuff and then hard core) and so no wobble should be possible. Makes more sense therefore that *something else* is causing that apparent wobble. Apparent since though we can measure it, we can’t measure what’s happening inside the Earth and say what the total angular momentum vector actually is. Still, if CoM is valid, then there must be something that is interacting with the Earth to cause that visible wobble.
As far as I can see, a gravitational link would not cause a wobble. There’s no tendency of a ball to align with a gravitational field. The Earth is not an electrical dipole, and so it won’t align along an electric field. That really leaves a magnetic interaction as a good guess, since we do know the Earth has a magnetic field. Since Neptune and Saturn are seen to have aurorae, they have magnetic fields, and we know the Sun has a complex magnetic field. Maybe there’s something else out there too. Still, to produce that wobble needs an application of torque, and the only torque I can see available is magnetic. Since AFAIK it’s only the core is magnetic, then there will again be that slow alignment of the angular momenta of the core and mantle mediated by the viscous magma between them. I have no idea of the half-life of that alignment process, but it could be quite a long time. What’s maybe happening therefore is a somewhat larger movement of the angular momentum vector of the core, followed by a catch-up of the mantle which is in fact our datum.
The precession of a gyroscope is used as an explanation of the precession of the Earth, but the explanation doesn’t wash for me. The gyroscope transmits angular momentum to the point it’s sitting on and thus can change its own momentum, yet the Earth isn’t balanced on such a point.
It’s possible that the solar wind being diverted by the magnetic field and coming in through the poles could supply a small force on the poles, and since the polarity of the solar wind (that we see at Earth orbit) changes roughly aligned with the seasons then there’s maybe something there if the magnetic and rotational poles are not aligned. I can’t see that being a large unbalanced force, though.
It’s a problem that’s bothered me since I found out that the Pole Star wasn’t always due North.
That comment should really have been on “obliquity”, but I put it on the wrong one. Sorry….
Major earthquakes could be used to put bounds on how long it takes the earth system to equilibraite at a new angular momentum and rotational period and axis, after a sudden input.
We know that the earths length of day changes following major earthquakes, as it does following major changes in thickness of the atmosphere changes.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/japanquake/earth20110314.html
If the mass distribution of the earth changes (center of mass shifts slightly) over time this would apply a torque moment on the the axis of rotation and slowly shift both the axis of rotation and cause other compensating changes in the earth’s mass distribution (slight shifts in sea level, and atmosphere would compensate to bring both back into a balanced dynamic system state.
On this same note this item from NASA and their efforts to do initial design work on a defensive system to stave off a serious asteroid impact.
The US space agency published details of its Hammer (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response) deterrent, an eight tonne spaceship which could deflect a giant space rock.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/03/15/nasa-draw-plans-huge-spacecraft-blow-doomsday-asteroid/
Don’t forget “spin-orbit coupling”. It works at the atomic level and there’s no reason why it can’t work in the macro too; just we haven’t figured it out yet. All those masses of all those bodies in motion somehow end up synchronized…
Larry, there was an article in the papers about one due to hit the Earth 2135, with that amount of time you only need to strap a couple of Rockets or a Light Sail to it and allow it to be deflected slightly over a long period. You don’t need to nudge it all in one go.
Although you could also do that with a lot of low yield atom bombs exploding over an extended period.
In the article NASA said they didn’t have any method of taking care of it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5506579/Doomsday-asteroid-WIPE-life-Earth-2135.html
Deserts are dry and oceans are wet. And climate change showed us these self truths.