True polar wander

True polar wander is a solid-body rotation of a planet or moon with respect to its spin axis, causing the geographic locations of the north and south poles to change, or "wander". Unless the body is totally rigid (which the Earth is not) its stable state rotation has the largest moment of inertia axis aligned with the spin axis, with the smaller two moments of inertia axes lying in the plane of the equator. If the body is not in this steady state, true polar wander will occur: the planet or moon will rotate as a rigid body to realign the largest moment of inertia axis with the spin axis. (See .) If the body is near the steady state but with the angular momentum not exactly lined up with the largest moment of inertia axis, the pole position will oscillate. Weather and water movements can also induce small changes. These subjects are covered in the article Polar motion. The mass distribution of the Earth is not spherically symmetric, and the Earth has three different moments of inertia. The axis around which the moment of inertia is greatest is closely aligned with the rotation axis (the axis going through the geographic North and South Poles). The other two axes are near the equator. That is similar to a brick rotating around an axis going through its shortest dimension (a vertical axis when the brick is lying flat). However, if the moment of inertia around one of the two axes close to the equator becomes nearly equal to that around the polar axis, the constraint on the orientation of the object (the Earth) is relaxed. This situation is like a rugby football or an American football spinning around an axis running through its "equator". (Note that the "equator" of the ball does not correspond to the equator of the Earth.) Small perturbations can move the football, which then spins around another axis through the same "equator". In the same way, conditions can make the Earth (both the crust and the mantle) slowly reorient until a new geographic point moves to the North Pole, with the axis of low moment of inertia being kept very near the equator.