Water Usage "Tilting" World's Axis
Nice The Washington Post piece on how humanity's use of groundwater has proceeded to the point of actually shifting the planet's tilt a solid 30 inches to the east:
Humans pump most of our drinking water from natural?underground reservoirs?called aquifers. Researchers calculate that between 1993 and 2010, we removed a total of 2,150 gigatons of groundwater — enough to fill 860 million Olympic swimming pools.
According to the new study, published on June 15 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, moving all that water has shifted Earth’s tilt 31.5 inches eastward.
This shift isn't enough to alter the seasons, but it does give scientists a way to "estimate the effect of groundwater pumping on sea level rise." As one cited expert put it:
“Groundwater pumping is one of the few management decisions that can be made about how to slow the rate of sea level rise. We are really having an impact on this planet, and we really need to be better stewards of Earth’s resources.”
In America's New Map, I make the core argument that climate change tilts our perspective of the world from an east-west paradigm to a north-south one. In the book, our water use is a big part of that story (Thread 35 -- Water, Water Everywhere But Not Enough to Drink: Why Tall Now Beats Wide).
When I first shopped this strategic argument around mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment about 15 years ago ... honestly, it was pretty much laughed off -- even by organizations that had frequently or long published my thinking. The notion that we were looking at a north-south future just struck darn near everyone like nonsense: I mean, come on! China! Now Russia! Then India! So many east-west dynamics to manage! Who cares about north-south?
That confidently dismissive mindset is eroding, particularly as generational turnover proceeds across these communities, and articles like this help because they make clear that humanity's planet-reshaping impact is unfolding along all sorts of climate-altering vectors -- and undeniably so.