Jerry Aupak sent me a e-mail asking if mining could affect or even cause Chandler’s Wobble. I am serious, there is a valid scientific phenomenon called Chaldler’s Wobble. It is not the name of some childrens’ game or a book by Enid Blyton.
Wikipeida, as always provides the most sensible and readable description of Chandler’s Wobble: Here is a short extract:
The Chandler wobble is a small motion in the Earth’s axis of rotation relative to the Earth’s surface, which was discovered by American astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler in 1891. It amounts to 0.7 arcseconds (about 15 meters on the Earth’s surface) and has a period of 433 days. The Chandler wobble is an example of the kind of motion that can occur for a spinning object that is not a sphere; this is called a free nutation.
A geophysicist from the Pasadena jet Propulsion Laboratory says the cause is two-thirds due to “ocean-bottom pressure changes” and the remaining one-third is due to fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. As always on the web there is a home page for the wobble, doubters, devotees, and those who ascribe it to mystic, religious, and/or environmental factors.
Jerry Aupak raises the issue of the impact of mining, presumable the mass movement of large volumes of material at and close to the surface of the earth, as a possible cause. He asks:
I’m just an ordinary guy who is really interested in mining activity around my community. I’m just wondering, as we have heard about mines since the early 1950′s up in the arctic, and I am wondering about the following. Since the cause of global warming is still in the debating areas or even unknown as how it is impacting anything or however view it is being looked at, would the mining and oil company side know about their activity are causing anything at all? Meaning, if the global climate change is taking place, and are being discussed, would you think that the mining industry worldwide and oil industry is causing a disturbance in the rotation of the earth’s axis? Maybe adding a little baby wobble into the “Chandler’s Wobble”? changing the blooming times for flowering plants and causing havoc on the wildlife that depend upon these flowers? It’s just me, that I’m wondering about. Maybe if the information is unknown, then maybe the people in the mining and oil industry authority community can discuss this issue, as I think it is legitimate that the global climate change is being caused by these such activities.
Personally I doubt that even really big mines are big enough to challenge water pressure on the ocean floor or fluctuations in air pressure as a causative factor. There is probably a computer model somewhere that can quantify these phenomena and prove my intuition. Recognizing that intuition is often a very bad guide to the physical world, I raise the question and invite you to comment—or e-mail Jerry as jaupak@hotmail.com .
I think it does.
O.k., here’s what I think I’ve learnt so far. Asteroid impacts, affect our climate. According to our oral history, the sun rise and sun set used to be farther south 40-50 years ago than today, which is high up in the air compared to the low rise half a century ago. There used to be no winters, and there was a big flood. Charlottetown P.E.I., impact, center at Iles de Madeleine, in the gulf of St. Lawrence river caused the “Little Ice age”, and created Hudson Strait, and the deepest portions of Hudson Bay. Hudson Bay impact, was about 13,000 years ago, created the interior plateau composed of fine sandy sediments (white, greyish sand), the north cordilleran volcanic rift, the oil sands, and another flood, and whole lot of islands further north, like Queen Elizabeth Islands, King William Islands, etc. etc.. Now, we’ve mined almost all the metals, jewelery, etc., which is contributing (accelerating the wobble) to this wobbling earth. But the main contributer to this wobble I think is the alignment of our milky way, which is going to shift in polarity roughly on march 2012.