Humans have pumped enough groundwater to change the tilt of the Earth
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Drift of Earth's Pole Confirms Groundwater Depletion as a Significant Contributor to Global Sea Level Rise 1993–2010
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
or even the official press release?
https://news.agu.org/press-release/weve-pumped-so-much-groun...
HN has a technical audience that appreciates primary sources.
I provided the original apparently shitty link (as measured by upvotes to your comment) to accomplish a secondary goal of introducing those who may enjoy it to the super minimal aggregator. I thought I was helping expose more fun stuff in the single submission.
You are absolutely right that the primary source is a much better link to provide. I'll do better in the future.
Alternatively I'm an Australian talking conversationally as Australians do, and one with a geosciences background, some > 1 million SLOC of geophysical codebase and 40 years on forums going back to pre WWW Usenet.
I have no control over what you think, but I'm happy to share thoughts given you've opened the door.
What you saw as a super minimal aggregator that exposed fun stuff, I saw as a little known URL domain of unknown provinance making bald statements indistinguishable from others of that ilk "Earth tilts | Pole Shifts | Sea level rises | Lab leaks | Fake News".
The guts of the story is in the details, the context, the methodology, etc.
If I wanted snappy clickbait titles with minimal content I'd stick with Fox News .. but I'm from the country of origin of Murdoch and he left due to widescale community pushback on his plans to dominate media and dumb down information (although he retains a toehold here with Sky News and a few newspapers).
You seem like a communicative well intentioned contributor, I bear you no ill will and look forward to your future submissions, ideally ones with substance.
Dunno who's behind Tribesman3875 but they're clearly not the sharpest crayon in the sun.
Oh, well, check out their response in any case, it might give you a chuckle if you've not seen it already.
So you're talking about a change in angular momentum that is on the order of 10^(-20) times the angular momentum of earth (mr^2 \omega).
A change in the pole of earths rotation by 31 inches (10^(-7) times the radius of earch) corresponds to a change in angular momentum on the order of 10^(-14). So we seem to be off by 7 orders of magnitude.
I call bullshit.
Groundwater is mostly under ground... And the center of mass of all the surface crust is hundreds of kilometres from the center of mass of all the world's oceans.
- pumped water gets used and flows to the oceans, far away
- we have pumped a lot of water (look up how much some places have subsided due to groundwater depletion).
- the earth's rotation is something we've worked out how to measure very, very precisely
It sounds completely plausible to me.
~8 trillion tons to raise the level an inch based on the simple math of surface area of a 24,000 mile diameter sphere, times 2/3rds water, as seen here:
https://www.answers.com/earth-science/What_Amount_of_water_r...
The water from aquifers is not just lifted a short distance up to the surface. It is used, ends up in rivers, and spreads around the world's oceans. And the places where we are pumping groundwater are not uniformly distributed around the Earth. We are essentially moving mass to the Pacific.
Genius HNer looks as the title, spouts some factually incorrect data to "debunk" it and gets upvoted to the top.
Sadly I'm not just describing this instance but internet discource in general. Critical thinking and analysis is dead in the age of "gotcha" hot takes.
They’re taking as read that the top level comment is wrong (as explained by a number of other comments), and making an observation about the circumstances surrounding the incorrect comment, as well as the theme it represents in the broader discourse.
In cases like this it's more than fair to call bullshit.
- Based on a cursory search, a large iceberg may weigh in at ~1 trillion tons. The calving process moves mass hundreds of kilometers away from Antarctica. This should be an effect of similar magnitude!
- The water cycle moves ~500 trillion tons of water each year. This water is moved hundreds of kilometers and isn’t evenly distributed over the course of a year. We should expect the impact of seasonal fluctuations in water distribution to thus have a comparatively much larger impact on the earth’s rotation.
I don’t think these numbers add up. I think we’re reading this story because it feeds into a certain kind of “we are hurting Mother Earth” mindset.
A-68 was part of Larsen C, a section of the Larsen Ice Shelf. Scientists found the crack beginning to form in November 2016. Scientists assess that A-68 "didn't just break through in one clean shot, [but] it formed a lace-network of cracks first."[5] The resulting iceberg was around 175 km long and 50 km wide, 5,800 km² in area, 200 m thick and weighed an estimated one trillion tonnes.[8][5]
I’m not sure if Wikipedia is right here however because the linked sources have changed to remove mentions of mass.
That said we should be able to do a pretty dumb calculation. 1 km3 of water weighs ~1 gt.
5800 km2 x 0.2 km = 1160 km3
1160 km3 of ice x 0.9 (density of ice compared to water) x 1 gt / 1 km3 leaves us with a mass of about 1044 gt or around 1 trillion tons.
Edit: also, I am not able to find an original source for the mass of B-15 being in the few billions range
More importantly, the article mentions removing annual effects on Polar Motion. They are averaging - somehow - to look at permanent changes. The annual effects may be an order of magnitude greater, it is not relevant.
Assume earth is a perfect sphere, let m be the mass of earth and r be the radius of earth. Let rdm be the relative mass of the water moved = 3e-8, let rdr be the relative distance of the water moved = 5e-6.
The change in momentum is rdm.m.(1+rdr)².r² - rdm.m.1².r² which is 2.rdm.rdr.m.r²= 3e-14mr². Looks about right for the change of axis you wanted.
There's other counter arguments but at least the oom analysis fits.
The location changes the axis because most land is on one side of the earth (centered around Europe), and most ocean is on the other side (centered around the south Pacific). Move mass from one place to another, and the axis changes.
The father/scientist of the article should not put his pencil down just yet. Very interesting hypothesis so far.
What they didn't realise was that turning lead into gold does not make lead as valuable as gold. It makes gold as valuable as lead.
This has happened before. Aluminium used to cost more than silver. The Washington Memorial is capped in aluminium for all of about 9 inches high, at fantastic cost.
Development of the Hall process made aluminium plentiful. It's now a cheap house-hold item we discard daily.
If we found a billion tons of gold, the value of gold would crater basically to the cost of actually bringing it to earth. We'd find uses for it (its pretty) but it'd make a terrible building material :)
Only if the process was commonly known. Alchemists were quite a secretive bunch. For example, if you asked most people to name a famous alchemist they'd probably come up with nothing, despite Isaac Newton being one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...
But they'll surely tell it to their wife and kids at some point. And somebody should leak the recipe.
>Isaac Newton
Oh. :D
It doesn't matter - even if you're the only one to know the trick, once you start dumping large amounts of gold on the market, its price will start to go down. Gold isn't something that gets easily used up, so the more of it is in circulation, the cheaper it gets.
This is the same trick economists play when saying "inflation doesn't matter". It doesn't in the steady state, but in the meanwhile, I printed the money and gave it to my friends, who do you think is going to end up owning all the hard assets?
Intriguing.
Operational security was also terrible, so it wouldn't have been kept as a secret limited to one country for long.
If you want to profit from making gold, you have to spend gold, and that's going to get noticed very fast. Its not like the common man was spending gold coins on a regular basis.
Not if you're the only guy who's figured out how to do it.
https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news
thanks for the nudge
But then I tried to look up what the actual impact of our planet’s tilt slightly shifting could be.
While I could not come up with anything meaningful, it appears glaciers melting also contributes to this [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/climate-...
>The rotational pole normally changes by several meters within about a year, so changes due to groundwater pumping don’t run the risk of shifting seasons. But on geologic time scales, polar drift can have an impact on climate, Adhikari said.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/melting-glacie...
> "At the same time, there are a lot of new salmon streams opening up in Glacier Bay, says Eran Hood, professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska. “As glaciers are melting and receding, the land cover is changing rapidly,” he says. “A lot of new areas becoming forested. As the ice recedes, salmon is recolonizing. It’s not good or bad, just different."
Human activity has become the dominant feature in most if not all ecosystems on Planet Earth, that's just the reality. The trigger has been pulled, welcome to the now.
> "As our gargantuan glaciers melted, the continents up north lost weight quickly, causing a rapid redistribution of weight. Recent research from NASA scientists show that this causes a phenomenon called “true polar wander” where the lopsided distribution of weight on the Earth causes the planet to tilt on its axis until it finds its balance. Our north and south poles are moving towards the landmasses that are shrinking the fastest as the Earth’s center of rotation shifts. Previously, the North Pole was drifting towards Canada; but since 2000, it’s been drifting towards the U.K. and Europe at about four inches per year."
So, I guess if we have a 31 inches over 17 years change via groundwater pumping, then we have 80 inches over 16 years due to glacial melt... how do they sort all that out? Did they even take the glacial factor into account?
I changed the tilt of the Earth.
Are our instruments sensitive to measure this? No.
Are our insanely accurate instruments able to measure other human activity? Yes.
Is the tilt change significant? Not at all.
Is ground water exploitation a problem? It is a massive problem, and one that doesn't need FUD distractions.
It's not a distraction, it is confirmation. In the future we can confirm groundwater pumping estimations by looking at axis tilt and it becomes harder to deny it happening.
EDIT: Reread the abstract. The previous estimations did not have direct evidence, this is such evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringwoodite http://www.hpstar.ac.cn/upload/files/2020/2/fab59e098740ea9c... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL09...
EDIT - was talking about 68k news link before it was changed.
mineshaft gap (in Dr.Strangelove): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
Otherwise I’d have said “am I a misanthrope”. No I don’t hate mankind at all and what I mentioned isn’t hating either.
I hope I was able to explain that I did believe that word wouldn’t fit in for what I wanted to say. Maybe some other word? sch………ude isn’t that word either I guess.
It sounds like what you’re getting at is a general sense of disenchantment with humans. Blessed are we that we have the capacity to look forward to our own demise, yet blanket our children with the picric acid of our lack of interest for solving it.
As someone with kids, I have a vested interest in solving humanities existential problems, but also lack the ability to actually do it. It’s bothersome.
But if we had of removed that amount of mass you'd expect the continent to rise. Maybe it's fuck all, still want to know the figure -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
and obviously the greatest source of land loss is ground water depletion near the sea. We need to replenish aquifers even if studies like these are just made up. And heck we could even raise our land near the sea rather than messing with dikes.
terraform: (science fiction) To transform the atmosphere (or biosphere) of another planet into one having the characteristics of Earth.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terraform
since we live on Terra, it has always had by definition terra-form, but if you use it to mean "make it support more humans inasmuch as we think we know how to do that", are you saying we're making it better or worse, unintentionally?
or are you just using it to mean "making planet-scale changes"?