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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2023 Jun 16, 09:45 -0700
No. Not really tilted by a glass of water!
There's a story about very small changes in the polar motion making the rounds. The claim is that the observed polar motion, small displacements in the Earth's rotational axis, can be modeled better by analyzing the removal of groundwater in North America, India, etc. It's a low confidence claim, but of course any time someone suggests that anything related to climate change, or the evils of Humanity more generally, are making the Earth wobble, it gets media attention!
Here's one summary: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-weve-groundwater-nudged-earth.html
The diagram accompanying the article seems to be specifically designed to create maximum confusion. Note the scale: mas/yr is milliarcseconds per year. What would an average intelligent reader without some significant science background assume when viewing that diagram?
Frank Reed
