After the Precession "wobble", what will be the new equator of the Earth?

Question

relative to the sun. That is of course after the Earth changes its orinetation of its axis, if it happens thousands of years or whatever doesnt matter, I just want to know what would be the new geographical extremes for weather. For example, If I were living in South America, where could south america be after precession completes. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The equator won't change at all. What will change is the perceived position of the stars. For example, Polaris will not be the North star and the constellations will be viable at a different time of year. The cycle is 25,800 years. There wont be a precession event in 2012.

Over billions of years the equator may change due to tidal forces from the sun and moon so that the equator lines up more with the ecliptic.

Answer 2

Precession is continuous.  There is no special "bump" in 2012 (or any other year).

By itself, precession changes nothing to the position of our equator, not to the angle between the ecliptic (the apparent path of the sun) and the equator.

The only thing that changes is the apparent position of  the Sun when it passes a special point relative to the equator.

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What does change the position of places relative to our equator is the movement of Earth's crust on the mantle.  This is a very slow movement.  You can see how slow this movement is by looking at a map of Hawaii.

All the islands were formed by the same plume of lava rising from the mantle, through the crust.  As the crust slips over the mantle, the older islands are moved away from the plume and a new island is formed.

The island of Kauai'i was formed over 5 million years ago.  It is the oldest of the Hawaiian group.  The "Big Island" (Hawai'i) is the most recent, with the next one being produced by a volcano still under sea level.

As you can guess, it will take a very long time for South America to find itself on the other side of the equator.

Answer 3

The "2012" precession?  There is no such thing.  Precession is a slow STEADY movement of the direction of the poles.  It takes about 25,765 years for the pole direction to change by twice 23.5 degrees.  That is about 1 degree in 548 years.

The movement is steady, but not always at a constant speed.   Plus, there are other things that change the orbit.  So in about 10,000 years, the pole-orbit angle will change from todays 23.44 degrees to about 22.1 degrees.  The difference between winter and summer will be a bit less, about 5% or 10%.

Answer 4

Precession is the rotation of the Earth's axis in space, in the same way that the axis of a spinning top slowly describes a circle. The earth's axis completes one rotation every 26,000 years. It doesn't 'start', 'stop', 'complete' or 'wobble' at any time, including 2012. It is a continuous movement which has been going on for billions of years.

The position of the Earth's axis through the body of the Earth stays more or less the same, except for polar wandering, which amounts to a few metres a year. The axis certainly isn't going to start moving to a new geographical location. South America will stay at the latitude of South America.

You do seem fixated by questions about all this 2012 nonsense. I don't know if you've genuinely fallen for it or whether you're playing devil's advocate.