I am not an earth scientist but for many years I have wondered about the following. I am curious if this has already been explored by scientists? If so, what is the theory formally called? and what is the consensus of the scientific community about such a theory?
CONCEPT: When you have new tires put on your car the mechanic will put the tire on a machine to check the balance and then add small lead or zinc weights on the rim to correct any wobble. Even though the weights are tiny by comparison they play a critical role in effective lifespan of the tires.
For the past couple hundred years humans have been moving "tiny" amounts of weight around the surface of the earth. We add weights when we build large cities, or dam rivers. We take away weights when we excavate and overdrafting.
There also of course are natural events that move "tiny" surface weights around, such as glacier movement, island formation, caldera eruptions, and meteor strikes. This last of course also imparts a vector of kinetic energy change due to impact force.
THEORY: I call this personal idea the "Wobbly Tire Theory" on the presumption that Earth has for millennia been dealing with axis wobble but has usually had time to adjust/stabilize between significant changes. However, in the past 200 years or so we have been making a lot of man-made changes in these weights in a timespan that is a geologic blink-of-an-eye.
I speculate that these rapid changes may be affecting the earths rotation in subtle ways. For example, I wonder could such changes affect the core's rotation vector in any way?
So back to my original Question: Does this theory (including OR excluding the last about man-made effects) already exist among geophysicists and others? What name(s) does it go by? And what details, if any, are there on the scientific consensus of this concept?