12 ms·
Humans have pumped enough groundwater to change the tilt of the Earth
- randyrand 3y agotechnically you only need to pump a single atom to make the headline true.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 3y agoBy modelling the previous location of groundwater (under the ground), and the new location of groundwater (on the surface of the ocean) one can calculate the change in the earths rotational axis that is expected. The measured change matches predictions only if this effect is considered. 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.
- Fyrezerk 3y ago[dupe]
- prometheanfire 3y agoGroundwater reservoirs have a recharge rate. That is the rate that surface, or I suppose even deeper, water is sequestered in the layer in question. We are extracting faster than that recharge rate.
- Espressosaurus 3y agoYes. We are mining water. While notionally replenishable, we are withdrawing from the water table in many areas (I'm familiar with California) so much faster than the replenishment rate that the aquifer is collapsing, meaning it will never be able to hold the water it used to anymore.
- richiebful1 3y agoThis photo [1] shows aquifer collapse and the resulting land subsidence well. 1. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/land-subsidence https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/l...
- sclarisse 3y agoYour link goes to the top of the USGS subsidence page.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dclowd9901 3y agoOk, but hydrologically speaking, the water goes _fucking somewhere_. So if it isn’t our underground reservoirs, maybe it’s, I dunno, above-ground reservoirs?
- Espressosaurus 3y agoFor California, the bulk of the water is sprayed on plants and evaporates. A solid 80% of the water used by humans goes to agriculture. The plants are shipped all over the world. In a very real sense, California agriculture is about mining water and then shipping it elsewhere. For the remaining 20%, it gets used by industry (10%) and residences (10%), where some of it goes back into the ground because it's watering the grass, but the bulk of it gets sent down the drain, in some cases to be reclaimed and reused (toilet to tap sewage systems) or sent to drain the the ocean. For other states the ratios are different, but California in particular is egregious in agriculture's abuse of the aquifers.
- defrost 3y agoWe pump it up by the megatonne over decades, we spray it outwards for crops or to water animals. Some travels back down through the soil, most either evaporates or is taken up by plant matter, sweat out, goes to meat, etc. - which results in movement of the water mass to elsewhere on the planet.
- iscrewyou 3y agoThere are many ways to recharge the ground water. One is filling up dedicated basins periodically and letting the water trickle down. These basins are managed regularly to allow the water to percolate. Rivers also help with ground water recharge but only within their watersheds and routes. Also, Newsom in California recently issued an executive order to use flood water from recent rains for ground water recharge. https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Refilling-Californias-Underground-Reservoirs.pdf https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Refilling-...
- dreamcompiler 3y agoYes. But it depends on the aquifer. For example the Edwards Aquifer in Texas gets recharged from rainfall. But the Ogallala Aquifer supplies water at least 10,000 years old and rain doesn't affect it. Once we pump the Ogallala dry it will stay dry.
- Grubbo 3y agoMining and trapping groundwater in billions of tonnes in sugary soft drinks which then sits in supermarkets maybe?
- Ekaros 3y agoI have no idea, but: Groundwater naturally is somewhat steady state. You get rain, it filters through and then there is spring or something somewhere and goes back to cycle in river or evaporation. Part of the cycle. Now if you remove more water than exit through the natural processes you move it out from groundwater table. Thus creating imbalance and changing the steady state.
- mjfern 3y ago<delete>
- freecodyx 3y agoThe end is inevitable, we should try our best and see what happens, but thinking that the root of issues is over-population is false,
- mtkhaos 3y agoIt's amazing goal orientation isn't fundamental
- fsckboy 3y agounintentionally terraforming? what is the definition you're using for terraform? 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 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"?
- ElFitz 3y agoI was about to make some joke about how this explained climate changed and meant we, in the end, need not worry about greenhouse gases. 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-crisis-has-shifted-the-earths-axis-study-shows https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/climate-...
- defrost 3y agoAny siginificant movement of mass, particularly mass far from the axis of rotation, changes the dynamic balance and induces pole shift.
- notjulianjaynes 3y agoFrom the press release linked in a comment above: >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.
- defrost 3y agoFFS is it to much to ask for a primary source? 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/10.1029/2023GL103509 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-groundwater-that-weve-nudged-the-earths-spin https://news.agu.org/press-release/weve-pumped-so-much-groun...
- undersuit 3y agoWell yeah... but the linked page is 1.59Kb in size and if you visit the heavier version of the page at: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/groundwater-depletion-earths-axis https://e360.yale.edu/digest/groundwater-depletion-earths-ax... it includes your links in the HTML and a third link about past discussion.
- defrost 3y agoThe original URL for this was woeful, while it did link to your link above and via that to Geophysical Research Letters it still makes more sense to directly link to the actual primary source, either the ELI5 AGU press release or the actual paper in GRL. HN has a technical audience that appreciates primary sources.
- sethammons 3y agoFor what it is worth, starting out with "for fuck's sake" makes me think you are an asshole. It starts a combative relationship. Your comments work well without that. Better, I'd say. 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.
- defrost 3y ago
- timmg 3y agoI’m really curious how much all our aquifer draining has added to sea level. I have no idea what the scale is. But I suspect it is enough to show up in measurements.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoTFA says it's a quarter of an inch.
- bilsbie 3y agoHow much would we have to do to get exactly 24 hour days?
- jaimex2 3y ago[flagged]
- dclowd9901 3y agoComment quality here has dropped immensely it seems.
- szundi 3y agoMaybe we could change the definition of an hour
- WithinReason 3y agoThat would be too difficult
- x86x87 3y agoSome may say that would be... time consuming!
- sclarisse 3y agoRegular day, or sidereal?
- mjfl 3y ago2 trillion tons = 1/3 of 1 billionth of the mass of the earth. the distance from the ground to the surface is around 5 millionths of the radius of earth (like 100ft) 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.
- aio2 3y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking.
- hughesjj 3y agoTechnically speaking I change the tilt of the earth every time I take a piss
- sufficer 3y ago[flagged]
- paulddraper 3y ago[flagged]
- voisin 3y ago[flagged]
- comfrey 3y ago[flagged]
- twothamendment 3y agoAre you suggesting that enough redditors moved to HN to change the tilt?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shwaj 3y agoI’m not sure if I’m supposed to panic more because we’re tilting the earth, or panic less because we’re melting less ice than we thought. Or panic the same because the jury is still out in this research.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoIs this some kind of anti humanity to think that every generation fucks up the earth in their way and increasingly and if that means the humanity ceases to exist that’s okay, because either I won’t be alive by then or if it happens in my time then eventually I die anyway and there’s nothing after that? So that’s fine. I mean let’s try to fix it, if not just fuck it and stop fretting over it. Let’s get done with either way.
- dclowd9901 3y agoJust an aside: the word for “anti-humanity” is “misanthropic”.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoThank you but I didn’t mean that and I am aware of that word. I meant actually “anti humanity” — something that kinda goes against the grain of humanity. Inhuman didn’t cut it either. 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.
- n40487171 3y agoI think you may be looking for some sort of Nihilism
- crossroadsguy 3y agoWhen I think of it, I guess it kind of it is. Maybe a bit of defeatism as well, or not. I don't know really :D
- sva_ 3y agoDamn, those apes are up to something.
- photochemsyn 3y agoThat's nothing compared to the interglacial-glacial 100,000 year cycle that set in since the Pliocene Era (c. 3-5mya). Current activity is kind of interesting though, accelerated time-frame-wise: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/melting-glaciers-are-wreaking-havoc-earths-crust-180960226/ 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?
- aaron695 3y agoI don't believe their figures. 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 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.
- dang 3y agoUrl changed from http://68k.news/article.php?loc=US&a=https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiPmh0dHBzOi8vZTM2MC55YWxlLmVkdS9kaWdlc3QvZ3JvdW5kd2F0ZXItZGVwbGV0aW9uLWVhcnRocy1heGlz0gEA?oc=5 http://68k.news/article.php?loc=US&a=https://news.google.com..., which points to this.
- froh 3y agoTIL about news.google.com rss feeds, by wondering what this obscure http://68k.news http://68k.news site might be? https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news thanks for the nudge
- lgleason 3y agoNext we will go from reducing carbon to reducing water usage based on another popular junk science theory.
- Hithredin 3y agoWe don't need this story to care about water usage...
- altacc 3y agoExcess groundwater extraction already causes numerous issue across the globe without considering a small effect on the Earth's tilt. Surely you don't need to accept any of the climate change science to accept that making the world a better place, doing less harm and using limited resources at a slower rate is a good thing. That's just simple thoughtfulness, common sense and good planning (all things humans are often terrible at).
- imtringued 3y agoObservations matching predictions is junk science.
- throwaway22032 3y ago[flagged]
- winrid 3y agoWould it kill them to add 10 bytes of css to make it readable on mobile? EDIT - was talking about 68k news link before it was changed.
- Enginerrrd 3y agoI don't understand, the 68k link is actually great on mobile. (Firefox on Android here. )
- winrid 3y agoNot on chrome. You have to zoom and scroll sideways constantly.
- idlewords 3y agoAnd further unbalance the earth? No way. We need those bytes for ballast.
- x86x87 3y agoAdding that much css could tilt the earth even more!
- LispSporks22 3y agoI've always wondered, once we get into asteroid mining, whether there will be a global "massening" if we bring more matter back to the planet. If the orbit should change and you know, cause problems and whatnot.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThat’s a hilarious idea. It wouldn’t surprise me if we did that. Find 1b tons of gold somewhere and start building houses out of it on earth
- bruce511 3y agoIn medievil times Alchemy was the search for changing base metals (mostly lead) into gold. Clearly unimaginable riches would follow. 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 :)
- onion2k 3y agoWhat 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. 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_studies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...
- carlmr 3y ago>Alchemists were quite a secretive bunch. But they'll surely tell it to their wife and kids at some point. And somebody should leak the recipe. >Isaac Newton Oh. :D
- 7ero 3y agoit's ok, because humans can control the trajectory of earth
- wombatpm 3y agoThis seems right up their getting all Americans to jump off a two foot high chair at the same moment to alter the planet’s spin and orbit
- vixen99 3y agoTo put this in perspective, ringwoodite in the mantle is estimated to hold up to 1% water. If estimates are correct this implies it holds three times more water than all of the oceans on the Earth's surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringwoodite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringwoodite http://www.hpstar.ac.cn/upload/files/2020/2/fab59e098740ea9c.pdf http://www.hpstar.ac.cn/upload/files/2020/2/fab59e098740ea9c... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL090973 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL09...
- dwighttk 3y agoTechnically any time someone pumps groundwater it changes the tilt of the earth unless other things coincidentally happen to cancel it out.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoBetter title: Yale scientists have improved geomeasurement until they could detect minute changes in axial tilt.
- Reason077 3y agoEven 2 trillion tonnes sounds like a very small amount of water compared to what must be getting redistributed by climate change? The Antarctic ice sheet alone weighs around 25,000 trillion tonnes. So even just melting 0.1% (25 trillion tonnes) of it would move far more water into the oceans than we've ever pumped from groundwater!
- pneumatic1 3y agoIn the next Austin Powers movie, Dr Evil will try to accumulate so much mass in one place that earth flies off its orbit.
- eggy 3y agoI am not saying the premise is BS, but like all engineering and science you create a hypothesis for a phenomenon, in this case the pole shift, to address it, and you create the formulas and parameters to be included and used. As others have pointed out, there are potentially a lot of other variables to be considered that they possibly did not include. To further test the hypothesis, they need to sharpen their pencils for round two or three. Some off the top of my head: if there are higher drought areas or more wetter areas due to climate change, did they consider that shift? Location, position, and magnitude of snow-melt basins, glacial melt and polar cap changes, earth moving human activities on scale by all nations (China making artificial islands, etc.), earth moving due to climate change - floods, drought, large volcanic eruptions, underwater tectonic activity - all an ongoing process), etc... The father/scientist of the article should not put his pencil down just yet. Very interesting hypothesis so far.
- markwalllberg 3y agoFascinating
- thsksbd 3y agoYesterday I had water in DC. A five hour drive with no stops later, I relieved my self. 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.
- rrobukef 3y agoThe article reads like the opposite to FUD because it's dry. Instead it's more like 'People previously estimated how much groundwater was pumped to the sea. If it is that much earth's axis should tilt like this. We checked, it does. It is actually the second biggest variable to explain permanent axis drift.' 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.
- giardini 3y agoBut can we use this as a weapon of war? Are we suffering a "groundwater gap"?8-)) mineshaft gap (in Dr.Strangelove): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
- NanIzJung 3y ago[flagged]