Shutterstock June 29, 2022 was 1.59 milliseconds shorter than the average day, scientist Leonid Zotov told CBS News. The normal length of a day is 24 hours or 86,400 seconds. But in recent years, the Earth’s rotation has increased, decreasing milliseconds to some days. “Since 2016 the Earth has started to speed up,” said Zotov, who published a study last March on what might be causing the changes in Earth’s rotation. “This year is spinning faster than 2021 and 2020.”ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb This increased rotation doesn’t shorten every day—just every once in a while. But if it continues, the main way of measuring time on Earth – a universal, highly accurate method known as atomic time – may have to change. A negative leap second may need to be added, in which the clocks will simply skip one second. “Since we cannot change the hands of the clock associated with the rotation of the Earth, we adjust the scale of the atomic clock,” Zotov said. Shutterstock But not all scientists are in favor of the negative leap second. In fact, Meta engineers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi recently wrote a blog post criticizing the idea. They said it could cause serious malfunctions in the technology, such as data corruption. The idea has never been tested. Shutterstock Some scientists theorize about Earth’s tides. Others believe that the constant melting and freezing of the polar ice caps causes the earth’s rotation to speed up and slow down. “It’s all about the law of conservation of momentum that applies to our planet Earth. Every person on the planet contributes to the momentum of the earth’s angular velocity based on the distance from the earth’s axis of rotation,” Obleukhov and Byagowi told CBS . . “So when things move around, the earth’s angular velocity can vary.” Shutterstock “This phenomenon can be simply visualized by thinking of a rotating figure skater, who manages angular velocity by controlling his arms and hands,” they said. “As they extend their arms, the angular velocity decreases, maintaining the skater’s momentum. Once the skater gets their arms back, the angular velocity increases. The same is happening here right now because of the warming of the Earth. The ice melt and lead to an increase in angular velocity’. Shutterstock In 2020, the planet experienced 28 of its shortest days in the last 50 years. The international Telecommunications Union, which is affiliated with the United Nations, has begun adding occasional leap seconds in June or December. The first leap second was added in 1972 and 26 have been added since then. According to Ars Technica, during a leap second, the clock ticks from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00. The medium “leap second” has caused technological problems in the past: A leap second added in 2012 caused crashes at Reddit, Gawker and the Australian airline Qantas. In 2017, a leap second brought down Cloudflare.
