The Earth Is Spinning Faster
One of the main bases for measuring time is how fast it spins around its axis. One rotation takes precisely 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.09 seconds. This is called a sidereal day. But recently scientists found that the Earth is spinning a little bit faster.
Image by SplitShire from Pixabay
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What I need to stress out is the fact that the faster rotation is not affecting the life on our planet in any significant way. And the reasons for why the rotational speed changes are also well known as it is affected by things like the Moon’s gravity, mountain erosion, or perhaps surprisingly to some it is also caused by snow.
Several decades ago, the development of atomic clocks allowed us to measure time with much higher precision than previously. That allowed us to measure the length of the day with an accuracy of milliseconds. With that, we found out that the rotation of our planet is much more variable than previously thought.
The discrepancy between the Earth’s actual rotation time and the 24 hour day we created is solved by adding a leap-second. Its goal is to even out the tiny difference between the 24 hour day measured with atomic clocks and the average length of the day based on the sidereal day that is affected by the irregular rotation of the Earth.
The leap-second is usually added during midnight of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) either on the 31st of December of the 30th of June. How it works, in reality, is that after 23:59:59 you don’t get 00:00:00 but 23:59:60. But we can also subtract a second and then the time of 00:00:00 follows immediately after 23:59:58.
So far, we only needed to add seconds as the Earth’s rotation was always slowing down in the past decades. But this trend is now changing and our planet is now rotating faster. Scientists point to the 19th of July 2020 as the day that was 1.4602 milliseconds shorter than the standard. The previous record of the time of a single rotation was the 5th July of 2005 but it was broken in 2020 28 times.
The experts are now asking the question of whether the faster rotation couldn’t have been caused by global warming that reduced the amount of snow cover in higher altitudes. But they don’t have any evidence for this hypothesis, at least for the time being.
The scientists estimate that the year 2021 will be on average 0.05 milliseconds shorter reaching a total of 19 milliseconds during 2021. If this trend keeps up we will eventually need to use the negative leap-second to keep our time right.
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