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Climate change is affecting the speed of the Earth’s rotation and could affect how we spend our time, a study has found.
Accelerated melting from Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the world’s oceans and redistributing mass.
That would slow down the Earth’s rotation by a small amount. However, the Earth is still spinning faster than before.
As a result, the world’s timekeepers may have to subtract one second from our clocks later than usual.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – used to adjust clocks and time in most parts of the world – is calculated by the Earth’s rotation.
However, the Earth’s rotation rate is not constant and can affect the length of day and night.
Changes in the planet’s liquid core caused the Earth to spin slightly faster.
Since the 1970s, around 27 leap seconds have been added to world clocks to correct this, and timekeepers plan to subtract one second for the first time in 2026. This is known as a “negative leap second.”
But the study found that melting ice due to climate change is partially offsetting that acceleration.
“It’s kind of impressive to me that we were able to do something that measurably changed the rotational speed of the Earth,” study author Duncan Agnew told NBC News. .
“Something unprecedented is happening.”
Negative leap seconds have never been used before, and their use would “pose unprecedented problems” to computer systems around the world, the study said.
Agnew, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, told AFP: “This has never happened before, ensuring that all parts of the global timekeeping infrastructure display the same time. “This is a major challenge in ensuring that this is done,” he said.
“Many computer programs for leap seconds will need to be rewritten because they assume all leap seconds are positive,” he added.
However, this research is met with skepticism.
Demetrios Matsakis, former chief scientist at the US Naval Observatory’s Time Services Division, told AFP that “Earth is so unpredictable that we can’t be sure” whether negative leap seconds will be needed anytime soon.
Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, are causing global temperatures to rise.
This rising temperature is having major impacts on the environment, including rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
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