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Melting polar ice caused by climate change is affecting Earth’s rotation, according to new research.
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We may have to adjust timekeeping by “jumping” a second in 2029.
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A human-caused change in the Earth’s rotation has never been seen before and could impact computing.
The climate crisis has gone so far that it is changing the shape and rotation of our planet and altering our experience of time, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The ice has melted enough to move sea level, so we can actually see the Earth’s rotation rate being affected,” Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and author of the study, told Nature.
Don’t worry, this change in Earth’s rotation won’t be catastrophic. But this means we need to adjust our timekeeping, which can be a problem for many of the computers we rely on.
Melting ice could delay dreaded negative bounce seconds
People keep track of time in seconds, minutes, and hours, and these measurements are determined by the Earth’s rotation on its axis and the Sun’s position in the sky (called the solar time scale).
But the sun’s timeline is not very precise because the planet’s rotation has never been constant; It varies depending on how fluids move both above and below the crust.
Therefore, people invented a more precise method of keeping time with atomic clocks and the atomic time scale.
However, on average every 1.5 years, these two time scales become misaligned due to the inconsistent rotation rate of the Earth. When this happens, we tune into what is called a leap second: a second added to realign the atomic time scale with the solar time scale.
We’ve been adding leap seconds this way since 1972, but we haven’t needed to since 2016.
This is because the Earth has been spinning faster and faster over the past eight years, for reasons that scientists are still trying to understand.
As a result, scientists predict that we will need the first thing in history negative The second step is now until 2026. So we need: extraction Instead of adding a second, one second from the atomic time scale.
But this new research suggests that climate change is slowing the Earth’s rotation rate, delaying this negative jump until 2029.
One second of time lost may not sound like much. However, adding and subtracting leap seconds poses major computational problems; so much so that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures voted to get rid of them by 2035.
Because computers, financial transactions, GPS and space flight rely on highly precise timekeeping, leap seconds could lead to “serious failures in critical digital infrastructure,” the bureau wrote in its decision. It added that the negative leap second that may soon be required “has never been anticipated or tested.”
“We don’t know how to deal with missing a second. That’s why time metrologists are worried,” Felicitas Arias, former director of the Time Department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, told Nature.
While Agnew’s study suggests we have more time before we face this alarming unknown, it’s worth noting that predicting Earth’s rotation is very difficult and the new study isn’t necessarily a definitive prediction.
“There’s a huge amount of uncertainty about this,” Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told The Washington Post. “There were predictions in the other direction a few years ago.”
How does melting ice slow Earth’s rotation?
There are three main mechanisms that control the Earth’s rotation:
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One of these is tidal friction, or the interaction between moving ocean water and the ocean floor, which slows the Earth’s rotation.
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Second, according to Agnew, changes in the glaciers that covered northern Canada and Scandinavia during the last Ice Age accelerated the rate of rotation, making the Earth more spherical.
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And finally, magma flows in Earth’s rotating liquid core change erratically, causing it to spin faster or slower, changing the rotation of the entire planet in the process.
But now there is a fourth factor attracting the attention of scientists: climate change.
As average global temperatures rise, polar ice is melting at an unprecedented rate and water is being dumped into the oceans. As meltwater moves from the Arctic to the equator (a process that raises sea levels and causes devastating coastal flooding), our planet expands slightly more in the middle, slowing its own rotation.
Picture a figure skater spinning with her arms above her head. Now imagine him lowering his arms and extending them to the sides, causing his rotation to slow down. Earth’s expanding equator has a similar effect on its rotation.
“To me, it’s really surprising that humans are causing the Earth’s rotation to change,” Agnew told CNN.
Maybe you’ve managed to escape mega-clouds of wildfire smoke, historic floods, and debilitating heat waves so far. But this new study reveals that the climate crisis is affecting even the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. No one can escape time.
Read the original article on Business Insider