The entire continent of Australia sways (a little) with the weather

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2016-10-26

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Our planet does some weird stuff that escapes our notice simply because of scale. The Earth spins faster during an El Niño year—or after some earthquakes—but we’re never going to miss a millisecond here or there. It’s also easy to forget that the plates that make up the Earth’s crust are in constant motion, changing various locations incrementally. In fact, Australia will be updating GPS coordinates again this year to correct the continent’s drift away from its last-mapped whereabouts.

But that’s not all. It turns out that Australia—yes, the entire continent—tilts and slides around in a little dance each year because of seasonal weather patterns around the world.

University of Newcastle researcher Shin-Chan Han uncovered this finding while fiddling around with satellite data. Earth-observing satellites can detect many of the small, weird things the Earth does and may even need to account for them to preserve their precision. The exact center of Earth’s mass, for example, is known to wander a bit.

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