Clickbait title.
Link to the original study:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL10...
Drift of Earth's Pole Confirms Groundwater Depletion as a Significant Contributor to Global Sea Level Rise 1993–2010Why shouldn't it happen?
I would guess that when there were gigatons of frozen water where there now is none that also changed the rotation of the earth.
Large magma flows and volcanic eruptions also change the rotation.
The earth is not a static system.
To most people it is a static system as they live life based on the Gregorian calendar, and that loop, and never look into the dynamism in nature.
Headlines like this are not intended to be hard science.
They’re intended to connect to most people’s beliefs. Usually they explain away the knee jerk false beliefs.
There is also a theory that the gravity made by the icecaps attracts water north and south. After melting, Sweden would see the water go down by 8 meters, the median point would be the south of England, and oceans would rise twice more around the equator.
>> ...we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to .24 inches of sea level rise.
For those confused how they managed that geometric analysis, the sea level rise mentioned in the paper [1] is caused by groundwater depletion. The tilt is caused by groundwater depletion. The sea level rise is not caused by the tilt.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL10...
The earth will be fine. I'm sure during the ice ages with gigatons of water trapped on the surface in glacial ice it would have had to changed the tilt also and the planet survived.
The earth is such a large and variable system that over the long term, humans can't significantly permantly change something like weight distribution.
Well yeah, it's never really about "save the earth", it's more precisely about "save ourselves by saving an earth that is habitable by humans".
> Planet Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches
How much would that be in degrees?
This doesn't make sense, it's like taking a spoon full of water from a barrel. Shouldn't affect anything.
It always surprises me how millions of planets can move about predictably for millions of years. Unless it's hit with some gigantic rock... or it gets infected with sentient life.
I would not draw that conclusion from this article - we don't have such fine-grained data from other planets, perhaps their axes are more wobbly than Earth's. E.g it was only in 2020 that we discovered Mars has a "Chandler wobble" similar to Earth's (which was discovered 150 years earlier). But Mars's wobble is quite different as a matter of geophysics, Earth's Chandler wobble is mostly sustained by ocean sloshing. There's a whole lot we don't know about the non-Earth planets.
I will add that human extraction of groundwater it not nearly as impactful as the formation of large igneous provinces and other ancient supervolcanoes. A tectonically active planet will definitely wobble unpredictably.
> or it gets infected with sentient life.
If only more planets could be so lucky.
What value does a planet have without sentient life there to enjoy it?
its survival bias, they were moving billions of years before, objects with unstable orbits traveled somewhere else, and stable objects formed stable planets.
Humanity is not an infection. And how many of those millions of planets can you name?
> https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL10...
Any chance the original link can be replaced with this? This is definitely way more informative than the clickbait article.
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I understand that this is ragebait, but even then, these are not mutually exclusive claims. There being a significant contributor doesn't mean it was the dominant contributor, and you being told things by some people doesn't mean you're choosing your sources well / the same as others.
Mutual exclusivity not applying so much so, that the article you're commenting on downright puts these events into the following hierarchy: groundwater pumping -> climate change -> sea level change. So it'd be a subset of the total effect of it on a theoretical pie chart: literally no conflict in the rhetoric.
Sigh. You made an account for this?
Do you know what a contributor is?
I understand if someone with cognitive issues buys into demonstrable fact denial, but hackers usually are way above that level.
When is the last time you heard anywhere that there are multiple contributors to the purported rise of the level of the seas besides global warming?
Global warming already has multiple contributors…so always.
The melting of ice caps, glaciers and others make no difference then.