Polar wandering

Description

UPSC GS PAPER I: Salient features of World’s Physical Geography.

Context: Melting glaciers due to climate change caused Earth’s axis to shift since mid-90s

The drift happened as the melting glaciers redistributed water, which made the direction of the polar wander turn and accelerate.
The latest research has that the Earth's North and South poles have moved since the mid-1900s.
They have been affected due to the melting of glaciers and other factors caused by humans, namely climate change.
The rapid melting of glaciers has also affected the rotation of Earth.
This study was conducted by researchers from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
Melting glaciers due to climate change caused Earths axis to shift since mid90s.
The drift happened in the mid-1990s as the melting glaciers redistributed water which made the direction of the polar wander turn and accelerate.
The new study uses data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and observations from the 2018 project GRACE-FO to explain the drift in the Earth’s axis due to glacier melting.

Polar wandering

It is the migration of the magnetic poles over Earth’s surface through geologic time.
Polar wander is the motion of a pole in relation to some reference frame.
It can be used, for example, to measure the degree to which Earth's magnetic poles have been observed to move relative to the Earth's rotation axis.
It is also possible to use continents as reference and observe the relative motion of the magnetic pole relative to the different continents; by doing so, the relative motion of those two continents to each other can be observed over geologic time as