This phenomenon could bring serious technological challenges.
The UK’s National Physical Laboratory has new measurements that show that the Earth is spinning at a faster rate than before, which makes our days slightly shorter.
The data was confirmed when scientists measured the Earth’s spinning rate and compared it to the one 50 years ago.
The Earth’s shortest day and its implications
On June 29, 2022, the Earth had its full rotation in 1.59 milliseconds less than the 24-hour mark, and that made it the shortest day ever to be recorded.
Scientists are now warning that this could lead to the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second.
They think that if the rotation continues to accelerate, we might be forced to remove a second from our atomic clocks.
This will potentially bring challenges for the Information Technology systems as their clocks would have to skip one second as well, and due to their reliability on timers, that’s where the devastating news start.
I find this so interesting and fascinating! My PhD thesis advisor did her own PhD dissertation on Earth rotation and timekeeping. Not my subject, but I find it impressive that we have got such a fine temporal resolution to measure all this! https://t.co/2Gt13AfWVM
— David GaladíEnríquez (@DGaladi) August 1, 2022
They attribute this phenomenon to something called the Chandler Wobble
Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard and Nikolay Sidorenkov are scientists that claim these irregular rotations by the Earth are a result of the Chandler Wobble, an irregular movement of the planet’s geographical poles across the surface of the globe.
Zotov assures that the Chandler Wobble’s amplitude used to be about three to four meters at the Earth’s surface, but it disappeared from 2017 to 2020.
Other experts believe that the melting and refreezing of the world’s highest mountain tops could be contributing to the acceleration of the rotation.
