Around the turn of the millennium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why.
For decades, scientists had been watching the average position of our planet’s rotational axis, the imaginary rod around which it turns, gently wander south, away from the geographic North Pole and toward Canada.
Suddenly, though, it made a sharp turn and started heading east.
Accelerated melting of the polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers had changed the way mass was distributed around the planet enough to influence its spin.
Now, some of the same scientists have identified another factor that’s had the same kind of effect: colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.
Persons:
that’s
Locations:
Canada