The Earth is spinning faster than usual

When the days seem to get shorter; They have been and are since the summer solstice in June. But the Earth recently recorded its shortest day for a completely different and unusual reason: the Earth is spinning faster. Scientists have found this development puzzling, although they have some theories about why it happened and the effect it has on our lives.

Scientist Leonid Zotov told CBS News that June 29, 2022 was 1.59 milliseconds shorter than the current average. The normal length of a day is 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds. But in recent years, the Earth’s rotation has bounced back, decreasing by a few milliseconds on some days. “Earth has accelerated since 2016,” Zotov said. A study was published last March About what could be the cause of changes in the Earth’s rotation. And this year it is running faster than it was in 2021 and 2020.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb

Don’t shorten this increased circulation every day – only occasionally. But if things continue like this, the main method for measuring time on Earth – a universal, high-accuracy method known as atomic time – may need to change. A negative leap second may have to be added because the hours can skip seconds. “Since we cannot change the clock arrows associated with the Earth’s rotation, we adjust the scale of the atomic clock,” Zotov said.

But not all scientists support the negative second jump. META engineers Oleg Obliukhov and Akhmed Biagoy even wrote a blog post criticizing the idea recently. They said it could cause serious malfunctions in the technology, such as data corruption. The concept has never been tested.

Some scientists imagine tides on Earth. Others believe that the constant thawing and refreezing of polar caps is causing the Earth’s rotation to speed up and slow down.

“It’s all about the law of conservation of momentum that applies to planet Earth,” Obleukhov and Byagowi told CBS. “Every atom on this planet contributes to Earth’s angular velocity momentum based on its distance from Earth’s rotation axis.” . “So once things are moving, the angular velocity of the Earth can vary.”

“This phenomenon can be easily visualized by thinking of a snowboarder who controls angular velocity by controlling his arms and hands,” they said. “As they extend their arms, the angular velocity decreases, which preserves the skater’s momentum. Once the skater bends his arms again, the angular velocity increases. The same thing is happening here now because the ground is warming. The ice caps melt and cause the lead velocity to increase. The angle.”

In 2020, the planet experienced 28 of its shortest days in the past 50 years. The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union started adding leap seconds occasionally in June or December. The first leap second was added in 1972 and 26 have been added since then.

According to Ars Technica, the clock ticks from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00 in a leap second. The average “leap second” has caused technical problems in the past: A leap second feature added in 2012 caused crashes on Reddit, Gawker, and Australian airline Qantas. In 2017, it jumped a leap second from Cloudflare.