If you feel like the days are getting shorter with age, you have no idea.
On June 29, 2022, the Earth completed an orbit that took 1.59 milliseconds less than the average day length of 86,400 seconds or 24 hours. While the 1.59ms drop may not seem like much, it is part of a larger, odder trend.
In fact, on July 26, 2022, another new record was set. O Determined when the Earth ended her day 1.50 milliseconds shorter than normal, as I mentioned earlier. look out for and time tracking website hour and date. The time and date indicate that 2020 had the fewest days since scientists began using atomic clocks for daily measurements in the 1960s. Scientists started noticing this trend in 2016.
While the average length of a day may vary slightly in the short term, the length of the day has been increasing in the long term since the formation of the Earth-Moon system. This is because, over time, the force of gravity has transferred energy from the Earth through the tides to the Moon, pushing it slightly away from us. Meanwhile, since the two bodies are in a tidal state – meaning that the rate of rotation and rotation of the moon is such that we only see one side of it – physics dictates that Earth’s day must be extended in order for the two objects to remain in a tidal cycle. . When the moon is gone. Billions of years ago, the Moon was much closer, and the length of the Earth’s day is much shorter.
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While scientists know that Earth’s days are getting shorter in the short term, the exact reason for this remains unclear — beyond the impact it could have on how we humans keep track of time.
“The rate of rotation of the Earth is a complex issue. This is due to the exchange of angular momentum between the Earth and the atmosphere, the effects of the ocean and the influence of the moon,” said Judah Levine, a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Department of Time and Frequency. Discover the magazine. said. “You can’t predict what will happen very far into the future.”
But Fred Watson, an Australian traveling astronomer, For ABC News in Australia that if nothing is done to stop it, “the seasons will gradually move out of the seasons of the calendar”.
“When you start looking at real details, you realize that the Earth is not just a solid spinning ball,” Watson said. “It’s liquid on the inside, it’s liquid on the outside, it has an atmosphere, and all these things rotate a little bit.”
Matt King of the University of Tasmania described the trend to ABC News Australia as “definitely bizarre”.
“Obviously something has changed, and changed in a way that we haven’t seen since the advent of precision radio astronomy in the 1970s,” King said.
Could this be due to extreme weather conditions? As I already noticed look out forNASA says Earth’s rotation could be slowed down by strong winds During El Niño years, this deceleration of the planet’s rotation. Similarly, the melting of the polar ice caps moves matter around the Earth and therefore can change the rate of rotation.
While this simple time absorption has little effect on our daily lives, some scientists are calling for the introduction of a negative “leap second” that would subtract a second from a day to keep the world on track to an atomic time system if the trend continues. Since 1972 leap seconds have been added every few years. The last one was added in 2016.
“It’s very likely that a second negative hop will be needed if the Earth’s rotation continues to increase, but it’s too early to tell if that will happen,” said physicist Peter Wibberley of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. Telegraph. “There are also international discussions about the future of leap seconds, and it is also possible that the need for a negative leap second could lead to a decision to permanently abandon leap seconds.”
