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c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcasting Corp reports:

From 1982 to 2005, we measured the location of the North Pole as drifting slowly southwards towards Labrador around six to seven centimetres each year.

But in 2005, the North Pole suddenly, and without any warning, did two new things. First, it chucked a leftie and started heading east, parallel to the Equator. Second, the North Pole more than tripled its speed to about 24-or-so centimetres per year.

Plain and simple, rapid melting of ice on land has driven Earth's North Pole to the east. This solid ice used to be on land, but is now liquid water spread everywhere across the planet.

We've been measuring this change to the land ice with satellites beginning in the early 1990s, right up to our current CryoSat-2, which was launched in 2010. Over the decades, the satellites have taken many tens of millions of height measurements. The most recent analysis tells us that between 2011 and 2014, Greenland and Antarctica between them were losing about 500 billion tonnes of land ice per year — about three-quarters of it from Greenland. This was an increase of two-to-three times over the previous loss rate as measured between 2003 and 2009.

Original Submission