Scientists are in shock after a recent discovery that showed that the Earth is spinning faster than it usually does, resulting in shorter days.
Namely, according to new measurements conducted by the National Physical Laboratory of the UK, the Earth is rotating faster than it did a century ago.
The full rotation of the Earth was observed on the 29th of June. And, it took 1.59 milliseconds for one rotation to be finished. This was the shortest day ever to be recorded.
According to scientists, if the rate of rotation continues fastening, it may be necessary to remove one second from the atomic clocks.
The astrophysicist Graham Jones explains that the speeding up of the rotation rate may lead to the first-ever negative leap second.
The Earth Is Spinning Faster than ever before & Days Are Becoming Shorter
Jones goes on to explain that this will be necessary to maintain civil time which is created on the basis of the super-steady beat of atomic clocks. They’re in sync with solar time that’s based on how the sun moves through the sky.
With a negative leap second, our clocks will skip a second and this could cause potential issues for the IT systems. According to Meta researchers, a leap second would have a negative influence on technology and may become a major painful area for hardware infrastructures.
The influence of the negative leap second has never been tested on a larger scale so, Oleg Obleukhov and Ahman Byagowi, authored researchers, note that it may have a negative effect on the software which is based on schedulers and timers.
It’s also a nightmare for individuals working in the management of hardware infrastructure. As explained by Nikolay Sidorenkov, Christian Bizouard, and Leonid Zotov, the irregular rotations are a consequence of the Chandler Wobble.
This is the irregular movement of the geographical poles of the Earth across the globe’s surface. Zotov explained that the normal amplitude of this wobble is around three to four meters at the surface of the Earth.
However, from 2017 to 2020, he explains, it disappeared. Some experts believe it’s the melting and refreezing of the ice caps on the tallest mountains in the world that could be causing the increase in speed.
Zotov adds that there’s a 70 percent chance that the planet has already reached the minimum day length so it means that there won’t be a need to use a negative leap second. But, he admits that there’s no way to be 100 percent sure with the currently available tech.