North Pole can shift 90 feet by 2100 because of humans

Earth's geographic North and South poles are at risk of shifting from their position by as much as 90 feet due to climate change. This revelation was made in a study that states that the melting of the ice sheets will lead to the ocean mass getting redistributed around the planet. This scenario is likely to unfold by the year 2100. This shift is expected to be of a whopping 89 feet and will happen as the planet's axis of rotation changes.

The study was published on March 5 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The change in the position of the poles will affect satellite and spacecraft navigation, the researchers said. The study took meltwater from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets into consideration in the simulations, followed by glacier melt.

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Earth begins to wobble on its axis when changes occur in the distribution of the planet's mass. This wobbling is regular and predictable and can happen due to several changes, such as those in atmospheric pressure and ocean currents. Sometimes interactions between the core and the mantle can also result in this happening.

Several other studies also suggest that changes in mass distribution can shift Earth's poles. The latest study was carried out by researchers at ETH Zurich. They looked into the movement of the poles from 1900 to 2018 and projections of ice sheet melt to learn how much the poles can shift because of changes in the climate.

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They found that if the world heats up at the worst rate, then the North Pole could shift towards the west by more than 89 feet by 2100. However, if things don't get as bad, even then the pole could shift by as much as 39 feet, as compared to its location in 1900.

"This effect is somewhat surpassing the effect of glacial isostatic adjustment, which is the effect of solid Earth rebound after the termination of the last ice age," study co-author Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, told Live Science. Kiani is an Earth scientist at the University of Vienna.

This means that "land at the surface of the crust sank under the weight of ice age glaciers and rose when they melted". This changes the distribution of weight in Earth's crust, resulting in the shifting of the poles. "This means that what humans have done has somewhat shifted the pole more than the effect of ice ages," Kiani Shahvandi said.

Earth's rotation axis is used in part to map a spacecraft's location, and the shift in the poles will affect satellites and spacecraft navigation, the researchers said.