Questão 15 - Conhecimentos Gerais - Santa Casa 2027

Leia o texto para responder às questões de 14 a 18.

     Published research from the University of Vienna and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich now establishes that human activity has pushed the planet’s rotation into territory unlike anything in 3.6 million years — and the engineers who keep Global Positioning System (GPS) working are already watching the numbers.

     The finding, published in March 2026 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, quantifies precisely what glaciologists and geodesists had been building toward: Earth’s days are currently lengthening at 1.33 milliseconds per century due to climate-driven ice melt and sea-level rise. That rate is, by the geological record stretching back to the Late Pliocene (a period in Earth’s history that lasted from about 5.33 million to 2.58 million years ago), without precedent.

     A companion finding — from a separate 2023 study by Ki-Weon Seo and colleagues at Seoul National University — adds a second human fingerprint: agricultural groundwater extraction shifted Earth’s rotational pole roughly 80 centimeters eastward between 1993 and 2010 alone, making groundwater pumping the single largest climaterelated driver of polar drift, according to that research.

     Together, the two lines of work establish something that the prior generation of Earth scientists could not have stated with confidence: humanity has become, in the span of decades, a geological force potent enough to alter the mechanics of how the planet moves through space.

(Maxwell Templeton. www.techtimes.com, 04.06.2026. Adaptado.)

In the excerpt from the second paragraph “That rate is, by the geological record stretching back to the Late Pliocene”, the underlined expression refers to the