Earth is spinning faster - here's why it could be a problem
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Earth is spinning faster this winter, making the days marginally shorter and attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com.

More exceptionally short days are expected on July 22 and August 5, with predictions indicating they will be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than a standard 24-hour day, respectively.

The Earth’s rotation is speeding up, which could cause major complications.(Getty)
Since 1972, a total of 27 leap seconds have been added to the UTC, but the rate of addition has increasingly slowed, due to Earth speeding up; nine leap seconds were added throughout the 1970s while no new leap seconds have been added since 2016.
In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to retire the leap second by 2035, meaning we may never see another one added to the clocks.

However, if Earth’s increased rotation speed continues for several more years, Agnew suggests that it might become necessary to remove a second from the UTC. “A negative leap second has never occurred,” he stated, “but there is a 40 percent chance of one happening between now and 2035.”

What is causing Earth to spin faster?

According to Agnew, the shortest-term variations in Earth’s rotation are influenced by the moon and tides. Earth’s rotation slows when the moon is over the equator and speeds up when it is at higher or lower altitudes.

This effect compounds with the fact that during the summer Earth naturally spins faster – the result of the atmosphere itself slowing down due to seasonal changes, such as the jet stream moving north or south; the laws of physics dictate that the overall angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant, so the rotation speed lost by the atmosphere is picked up by the planet itself.

Similarly, for the past 50 years Earth’s liquid core has also been slowing down, with the solid Earth around it speeding up.

By looking at the combination of these effects, scientists can predict if an upcoming day could be particularly short.

“These fluctuations have short-period correlations, which means that if Earth is speeding up on one day, it tends to be speeding up the next day, too,” Judah Levine, a physicist and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the time and frequency division, said.

“But that correlation disappears as you go to longer and longer intervals. And when you get to a year, the prediction becomes quite uncertain.

“In fact, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service doesn’t predict further in advance than a year.”

While one short day doesn’t make any difference, Levine said, the recent trend of shorter days is increasing the possibility of a negative leap second.

“When the leap second system was defined in 1972, nobody ever really thought that the negative second would ever happen,” he noted.

“It was just something that was put into the standard because you had to do it for completeness.

“Everybody assumed that only positive leap seconds would ever be needed, but now the shortening of the days makes (negative leap seconds) in danger of happening, so to speak.”

The prospect of a negative leap second raises concerns because there are still ongoing problems with positive leap seconds after 50 years, explained Levine.

“There are still places that do it wrong or do it at the wrong time, or do it (with) the wrong number, and so on.

“And that’s with a positive leap second, which has been done over and over.

“There’s a much greater concern about the negative leap second, because it’s never been tested, never been tried.”

Because so many fundamental technologies systems rely on clocks and time to function, such as telecommunications, financial transactions, electric grids and GPS satellites just to name a few, the advent of the negative leap second is, according to Levine, somewhat akin to the Y2K problem – the moment at the turn of the last century when the world thought a kind of doomsday would ensue because computers might have been unable to negotiate the new date format, going from ’99’ to ’00.’

Climate change is also a contributing factor to the issue of the leap second, but in a surprising way.

While global warming has had considerable negative impacts on Earth, when it comes to our timekeeping, it has served to counteract the forces that are speeding up Earth’s spin.

A study published last year by Agnew in the journal Nature details how ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland is spreading over the oceans, slowing down Earth’s rotation – much like a skater spinning with their arms over their head, but spinning slower if the arms are tucked along the body.

“If that ice had not melted, if we had not had global warming, then we would already be having a leap negative leap second, or we would be very close to having it,” Agnew said.

Meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has is responsible for a third of the global sea level rise since 1993, according to NASA.
The mass shift of this melting ice is not only causing changes in Earth’s rotation speed, but also in its rotation axis, according to research led by Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor at the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering of The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

If warming continues, its effect might become dominant.

“By the end of this century, in a pessimistic scenario (in which humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases) the effect of climate change could surpass the effect of the moon, which has been really driving Earth’s rotation for the past few billions of years,” Soja said.

At the moment, potentially having more time to prepare for action is helpful, given the uncertainty of long-term predictions on Earth’s spinning behaviour.

“I think the (faster spinning) is still within reasonable boundaries, so it could be natural variability,” Soja said.

“Maybe in a few years, we could see again a different situation, and long term, we could see the planet slowing down again.

“That would be my intuition, but you never know.”

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