BEIJING, CHINA — The Guardian reports that a study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that recent human activity has shifted the Earth's axis by an unprecedented margin. <br /><br />The planet's geographic north and south poles are the points where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. <br /><br />Changes in how the Earth's mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move. <br /><br />In the past, only natural factors, such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth, contributed to the drifting of the poles. <br /><br />But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans — resulting from global warming — has caused the poles to move in new directions. <br /><br />The scientists found the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995. <br /><br />Since 1980, the positions of the poles have moved about 4 meters. <br /><br />The study theorizes that the accelerated decline of water stored on land is the main driver of the rapid polar drift since the 1990s.
