For the first time, researchers from ETH Zurich have succeeded in fully explaining the various causes of long-term polar motion in the most complex modeling to date using AI methods. Their model and their observations show that climate change and global warming will have a greater effect on the Earth's rotation rate than the influence of the Moon, which has predestined the lengthening of the day for billions of years.

Climate change is causing the melting of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Water from the polar regions flows into the world's oceans — and especially into the equatorial region.

"This means that there is a displacement of mass and this affects the rotation of the Earth," explains Benedikt Soja, professor of space geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering at ETH Zurich. (More on phys.org)