The length of Earth’s days and the orientation of our planet are out of balance, caused by man climate change is constantly changing the Earth’s rotation, new research shows.
These changes will be imperceptible to us at first, but they could have serious side effects, including forcing us to introduce negative leap seconds, interfering with space travel and altering our planet’s inner core, the researchers warn.
A day on Earth lasts about 86,400 seconds. But the exact time it takes our planet to complete one rotation can shift by fractions of a millisecond each year due to a number of factors, such as tectonic plate movements, changes in the rotation of the inner core and gravitational pull from The moon.
However, human-caused climate change is another factor that could change the length of our days, and scientists are only just beginning to realize how much this will affect the rotation of our planet in the coming years.
Over the past few decades, the rate of ice loss from Earth’s polar regions, especially Greenland and Antarcticaincreases rapidly due to Global Warming, leading to sea level rise. Most of this extra water accumulates near the equator, causing our planet to bulge slightly around the middle. This, in turn, slows the planet’s rotation because more weight is distributed further away from the center of the planet – similar to how figure skaters slow down by moving their arms away from their bodies.
In the new study, published on July 15 in the journal PNASthe researchers used an advanced AI a program that combines real-world data with the laws of physics to predict how the planet’s rotation will change over time.
Connected: Everything you need to know about planet earth
The results support a similar research published in March, which suggests that Earth’s days will get longer in the future. However, the new program offered much more accurate estimates of how the days will lengthen over time.
The same research team behind the new paper also published another study published July 12 in the journal Nature Geoscience, which showed that increased water near the equator moves the Earth’s axis of rotation. This causes the magnetic poles to wobble further and further off-axis each year.
Scientists have previously found that this effect exists probably happening in the last three decades. However, the new study suggests that the axis will move even further from its current position than previous studies predicted.
“We humans have a greater impact on our planet than we realize,” Benedict Soyaa surveyor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland who co-authored both new studies, said in statement. “And this naturally places a great responsibility on us for the future of our planet.”
It spins slower
Earth Days they always differed in length. About 1 billion years ago, our planet probably took only 19 hours to complete one rotationbefore slowing down to the 24 hours we experience today.
It also changes on shorter time scales. For example, in 2020 Earth was spinning faster than at any time since records began in 1960. In 2021 the rotation of the planet started slowing down again although we survived the shortest day on record in June 2022
But overall, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down for millennia, mainly due to a process known as lunar tidal friction, where the Moon’s gravitational effect on our oceans pulls water away from the poles. Currently, this effect lengthens our days by about 2.3 milliseconds every century.
New research shows that climate change is currently lengthening our days by about 1.3 milliseconds every century. However, based on current global temperature patterns, researchers predict this could increase to 2.6 milliseconds per century by the end of the 21st century, making climate change the single biggest influence on our planet’s rotation.
Potential impacts
One of the most likely effects of longer days would be the need to introduce negative leap seconds – where we sometimes lose a second from some future days to accommodate the lengthening days, similar to how leap years work.
The March study suggests that this may need to start happening as early as 2029, mainly to account for how much days have already lengthened over the past few millennia.
In the past, scientists suggested that this input could be messed with timekeeping on computers and smartphones. However, not everyone is convinced that this will be a serious problem.
The researchers of the new studies also noted that future changes could affect space travel.
“Even if the Earth’s rotation changes only slowly, this effect must be taken into account in space navigation — for example, when sending a space probe to land on another planet,” Soya said. It is therefore important to monitor these changes closely, he added.
The team also warned that changes in Earth’s rotation axis could alter the spin of Earth’s inner core, which could further increase how quickly the days are lengthening. However, this potential interaction is still largely unknown.
