Miscellaneous - This Day That Age   

dated January 24, 1956: The Poles are wobbling

The North and South Poles are wobbling about, Greenland ice is melting and even the length of a day changing. British astronomers, who are very much worried about it all, met in London on January 22 to try to explain just what was going wrong with the earth. Mr. Thomas Goll of the Royal Observatory said the length of a day was changed by the sinking of mountains or even of whole continents into the substratum of the earth. Movement of a few millimetres would account for the alterations, amounting to perhaps one-thousandth of a second a year. About the slight wobble of the North and South Poles, he said, the movement of surface material could move the Poles through considerable distances. The only thing that conferred some degree of stability on the earth was the fact that it was not quite spherical - there was a bulge at the Equator. Fortunately, the bulge possessed a natural tendency to correct any wanderings by either Pole. According to Mr. Goll, if the continent of South America were to suddenly rise by 30 degrees, the earth would start toppling over at a rate of one degree every thousand years. Greenland ice, he said, was melting steadily at a rate sufficient to account for the movement of the North Pole through a length of a second in the direction of Newfoundland.

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