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Most people are aware of the adverse effects of climate change, such as melting ice caps, rising temperatures, the increasing sea level, increased precipitation across the globe, and arctic animals migrating to higher and cooler grounds. (1) However, the Inuit people are suggesting that global warming is creating an even more drastic shift: The Earth tilting on its axis.

Why The Inuit People Believe The Earth Is Shifting
Ludy Pudluk of Resolute Bay opens the interview by discussing how the Inuit people used to only have one hour of daylight to hunt the seals in the Arctic. Today, however, they have two. “The daylight is a lot higher on the horizon,” he says. This isn’t the only change in the environment for a community that often depends on the surrounding nature for navigation and time.
Inookie Adamie, through his years of watching the sun, has noticed that the sunset position has dramatically shifted. He is the first to present the theory: “Perhaps the earth has tilted on its axis.”
Elijah Nowdlak, a native of Pangnirtung, backs up Adamie’s perspective. “The sun used to set close to the highest peak,” Nowdlak explains. “After the shift, the sun now sets past the highest peak.”
An altered sun position can greatly impact the Inuit people in ways more worrisome than creating more daylight hours. Jaipitty Palluq from Igloolik explains that with the sun higher, its rays hit their tundra more directly, warming the environment. This increased heat can melt the ice sheets and send the Arctic animals, the Inuit community’s prime source for food and supplies, into cooler terrain.
Yet the sun isn’t the only thing that has shifted. “The stars look different,” says Samueli Ammaq from Igloolik. He used to depend on astrology while traveling, but is now forced to use landmarks for directions.
“Our world has changed,” he says, “land, sky, and environment.”
Pudluk claims that the winds have changed as well. The once strong north wind has been replaced by a south wind and dominating east wind, a shift that was rare in the past. “East winds are strong and bring bad weather,” says Pudluk. “The east wind is now like the north wind.”
The Inuit people detect a difference in the sun position, stars, and winds, and attribute it to a shift in the earth’s axis. This phenomenon sounds dramatic, but is it even possible?
Is The Earth Actually Shifting?
The fact is the Earth continuously shifts on its axis. When we think of our planet, we tend to picture a globe on desk, spinning smoothly on its ‘axis.’ In reality, NASA has confirmed the Earth wobbles as it turns, but only in amounts too minuscule to affect our daily lives. Within a century, the geographical north pole (not to be confused with the magnetic north pole which affects compasses) can drift almost 10 meters, farther or closer to its origin. (8) The pole can ‘wobble’ over extended periods of time depending on the pulls from the moon and sun, motion in Earth’s core and mantle, and seasonal changes on the planet’s surface.
In past years, the geographical north pole had seemed to move towards Hudson Bay in Canada. However, it has recently taken a plunge east, toward London, England at a speed of about 17 inches a year. With weather changes being a factor to axis shifts, scientists are considering climate change to be the reason for this sudden shift. They are calculating how much melted ice and alternating precipitation can affect the pole.
“Melting polar ice enters the oceans as water, and one effect of this process is to move mass around on Earth’s surface,” says Dr. James Davis, Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He explains that the mass being moved is also internal, in Earth’s mantle and core, which changes the shape of our planet. According to him, this effect of this movement “is to make Earth less round and more squished from pole to pole.”
The First Recorded Axis Shift
This is not the first time the poles have moved so drastically. After the ice age that lasted over 10,000 years, the north pole turned west as the ice melted and redistributed the Earth’s mass. This pattern was noted in 1899 until the year 2000, when the north pole turned eastward.
In 2013, Jianli Chen, geophysicist at The University of Texas in Austin, was the first researcher to connect the increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet to this sudden change. His team studied the recent mass ice melting and the resulted rise in sea level. They included all the ice lost across the globe in their studies, but found Greenland to have been affected the most by global warming. They concluded that this accumulation of ice melting was the cause for more than 90% of the eastward pole shift.
“If you’re losing enough mass to change the orientation of the Earth, that’s a lot of mass,” says John Ries, a colleague of Chen’s.

Is the Shifting Caused by Water?
However, there may be another factor to account for the axis shift. Surendra Adhikari and Erik Ivins, both geophysicists from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, consider the varied amounts of water within each continent to be responsible.
Their own calculations show that the melting in Greenland is inadequate to generate the energy required to tilt the axis. They used data from the same source as Chen’s team: GRACE, a pair of twin satellites sent into orbit for “gravity recovery and climate experiments.” The satellites track the water moving on Earth caused by the weather, seasons, climate, and human activities For their studies, Ivans and Adhikari specifically monitor the loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica, the sea level rise, and where dry soils are causing drought. (2)
Ivans claims that there is another force bringing the pole towards the east: the dry spell over Europe and Asia. Over time, there has been less rainfall in this area, decreasing the water mass in these continents, and thereby drawings the north pole towards the lighter part of the Earth. In fact, in the years when Eurasia was lush, the axis took a westward swing.
“We think this flip is happening all the time,” says Ivins. “It’s a natural phenomenon that characterizes the entire Earth rotation time-series going all the way back to 1899.”
Is the Shift Caused by Humans?
The data from the GRACE mission is not a strong indicator whether these changes are man-made or not. However, Chen believes the shift to be a result of human activities, while Ivins presumes he will be able to extract human responsibility for the climate change from the data in a matter of six months. Both scientists strongly believe global warming is directly associated with human activity.
Since the Earth’s motion and the climate are closely connected, scientists are able to use historical records of the poles’ motion and examine the changes in the climate.
“If those changes are less dramatic than the ones we see today,” says Ivins, “then scientists could say that global warming has a controlling influence on Earth’s poles.” (3) (4) (5)
The Inuit people are the first to feel the effects of the tilt and climate change, but with the temperature rising and falling in different places, it’s possible that despite industrial living, the changes will affect us as well. After all, with data stating climate change is the cause of the axis shift, we are a large part of the reason why it is happening.
Ivins says about the tilt: “It is just one of those things you can put on that list of, ‘Oh my G-d! Climate change really does that?’ Well, yeah, this is one of those.” (6)
Some people have trouble believing that we as small human individuals can impact a system as great at the climate. Our routine actions seem so minute and irrelevant compared to the magnitude of the Earth. Yet every day we drive our cars, consume food transported by trucks, boats, or planes, turn on lights, and heat or cool our homes. It doesn’t seem like a big deal at the time, yet with millions of others doing the same, we have emitted 8 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in just the year 2007.

What We Can Do About Climate Change
It’s really astounding when you think about it. We, the tiny inhabitants of Earth, can literally move the planet’s axis through our way of life. Though with glaciers melting and animals being forced to leave their habitats, we are damaging our home planet.
Here’s a reminder of the small changes we can incorporate to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases:
- Use compact fluorescent lightbulbs
- Add insulation to our houses
- Drive less
- Raise minimum mileage on cars
- Petition for a federal carbon tax (7)
Sources:
- National Geographic. Effects of Global Warming. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-effects/ Accessed: October 27, 2017
- NASA. GRACE mission making plans for final science data collection. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2629/grace-mission-making-plans-for-final-science-data-collection/ Published: September 14, 2017. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- Shannon Hall. NASA: Earth’s poles are tipping thanks to climate change. Scientific American. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/nasa-earths-poles-are-tipping-thanks-to-climate-change Published: April 28, 2016. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- C. Claiborne Ray. When the Ice Melts. NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/does-melting-polar-ice-affect-earths-tilt-and-spin.html Published: Sept 17, 2012. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- Carol Rasmussen, NASA Earth Science News Team. NASA Study Solves Two Mysteries About Wobbling Earth. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. CAlifornia Institute of Technology. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6332 Published: April 8, 2016. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- Adam Wernick. Melting ice is causing the Earth’s axis to shift direction. PRI. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-04/melting-ice-causing-earths-axis-shift-direction Published: May 4, 2016. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- Lonnie G Thompson. Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options. Behav Anal. 2010. Fall; 33(2): 153–170. PMCID: PMC2995507. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995507/ Published: Fall 2010. Accessed: October 27, 2017
- Carol Rasmussen. NASA Study Solves Two Mysteries About Wobbling Earth. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-study-solves-two-mysteries-about-wobbling-earth Updated: Aug. 4, 2017. Accessed: November 1, 2017.