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More From Popular Mechanics Does Nothingness Exist? Delve into the depths of liberalforum.net..Water has mass, and mass has leverage. Move enough groundwater from aquifers onto farms, into cities, and eventually into the ocean, and Earth’s spin changes by a measurable amount.The shift is tiny on a planetary scale, but the number still grabs you: between 1993 and 2010, researchers estimated that groundwater depletion nudged Earth’s rotational pole by about 31.5 inches.

The figure comes from a 2023 study in Geophysical Research Letters, which estimated that humans depleted about 2,150 gigatons of groundwater between 1993 and 2010. When researchers added that water movement to their polar-motion model, the model lined up much better with the observed drift of Earth’s rotational pole. The same groundwater loss equaled about 6.24 millimeters—roughly 0.24 inches—of global sea-level rise.“Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University and study lead, says in a statement. “Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.”