Atomic clocks and exact astronomical measurements have shown that days are suddenly growing longer, but scientists are unsure of the cause.
This has a significant impact on our ability to keep accurate time as well as other modern technologies like GPS.
The length of a day is determined by the Earth’s rotation around its axis, which has been accelerating during the past few decades. Our days have been getting shorter due to this tendency; in fact, in June 2022, we established a record for the shortest day in the last 50 years or so.
Unknown Cause:
Despite this achievement, the continuous acceleration has strangely slowed down after 2020; the cause of this is yet unknown. Days are once again growing longer.
The time it takes for Earth to complete one spin varies very slightly, despite the fact that the clocks on our phones show there are exactly 24 hours in a day. Even earthquakes and storm events can contribute to these changes, which can take place over timescales ranging from millions of years to virtually quickly.
Global Impact:
It turns out that a day rarely has exactly 86,400 seconds.
The planet’s constant change Earth’s rotation has slowed down over millions of years as a result of friction brought on by the Moon’s tides. It lengthens each day by 2.3 milliseconds every century as a result of this process. A day on Earth was just approximately 19 hours long a few billion years ago.
Another process, which has been operating in the opposite direction for the last 20,000 years, has speed up the rotation of the Earth. Earth’s mantle began gradually sliding toward the poles as the last ice age ended as a result of the polar ice sheets melting, which decreased surface pressure.
Our planet’s spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earth’s axis, just as a ballet dancer spins faster when they draw their arms toward their body — the axis around which they spin. And over the course of a century, this technique cuts each day by around 0.6 milliseconds.
Image Source: RawPixel
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