Climate change is causing Greenland and Antarctic ice to melt, shifting water to the equatorial regions and affecting Earth’s rotation, which lengthens days by a few milliseconds. Supported by NASA, ETH Zurich researchers showed that this impact could surpass the moon’s influence on Earth’s rotational speed and is also shifting the Earth’s axis of rotation.
Melting polar ice due to climate change is redistributing Earth’s mass, slowing its rotation and slightly extending the day, as highlighted by ETH Zurich’s studies supported by DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2406930121
“Contributions of core, mantle and climatological processes to Earth’s polar motion” by Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, Surendra Adhikari, Mathieu Dumberry, Sadegh Modiri, Robert Heinkelmann, Harald Schuh, Siddhartha Mishra and Benedikt Soja, 12 July 2024, Nature Geoscience.
DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01478-2
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