this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Is it just me, or is 31 inches over two decades an incredibly frightening number?
The observed drift since humans have been able to make these observations is that our natural tilt fluctuates 2⁰ over 40,000 or so years. Which comes out to about 576 inches a year (I didnt do the maths, im basing this off the speed that the polar circle is currently drifting, not sure if thats the best way to approximate earths tilt vs. orbital plane). So comparing that to 31 inches of drift per year due to water, this seems to account for roughly 5% of the observed axial drift of the earth.
It's dawning on me that our most current astronomical measurements and this study are drawing on the same time period of observations, and that most of the water humans have moved around on earth likely occurred before and/or after the decades this model accounts for. So yeah, it's troubling.
Haven't humans been extracting groundwater (i.e. drilling wells for drinking water & irrigation) since prehistoric times? No doubt our usage has grown in recent decades. Our use of nearly all resources has become much more intensive over time. But it's not easy to see how civilization might exist away from immediately riparian areas without using groundwater.
I don't intend to imply that groundwater extraction should cease, only that this effect desperately needs to be studied further. Perhaps we can develop a way to safely replace or counterbalance the mass of the groundwater we take out. Perhaps we wont need to, and natural processes that take longer than human timescales will have negative feedback mechanisms that will gradually counteract the effect. We need more precise data than an 2 decades model can provide if we want to be able to project how this will continue. Of course we also don't want Antarctica at the equator in X thousand years. We should understand what's happening better before we define and label this as a problem problem develop and propose solutions. But the known unknown, the potential for extreme axial drift leading to mass exctinction via a "global roll," is just waiting to be investigated.