Otational Axis News Today

Why does Earth have regular seasons when other planets don't?

You might hate winter, but at least you know what to expect every year. Other planets have wobbly axes that lead to wild, unpredictable seasons.

Around the turn of the millennium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why. For decades, scientists had been watching the average position of our planet’s rotational axis, the imaginary rod around which it turns, gently wander south, away from the geographic North Pole and toward Canada. Suddenly, though, it made a sharp turn and started heading east. In time, researchers came to a startling realization about what had happened. Accelerated melting of t...

New research shows that persistent groundwater extraction over more than a decade has shifted the axis on which our planet rotates.

The way humans pump groundwater from the planet's interior has changed Earth's tilt by 31.5 inches (80 centimeters) between 1993 and 2010.