Groundwater extracted for irrigation and other human activities displaced 2,150 gigatons of water between 1993 and 2010.
Humans pumped and displaced so much groundwater in just two decades that we shifted the tilt of Earth's axis, new research suggests.
That's because groundwater used for irrigation and other human activities eventually ends up in the ocean, which redistributes mass from where the water was taken to other parts of the globe."Earth's rotational pole actually changes a lot," research leader Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University in South Korea, said in a statement.
To determine how much groundwater depletion and resulting sea level rise contributed to polar drift, geophysicists built a model of polar motion that accounted for shifts in water mass associated with thinning ice sheets, melting glaciers and water storage in reservoirs.
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