Experts have found that the Earth has made its shortest day since the beginning of recorded history, shaving off 1.59 milliseconds from the usual 24-hour spin on June 29, risking potentially negative effects on software that rely on timers or schedules.
For years, our planet's rotation has been known to slow down occasionally, with 27 leap seconds needed to keep atomic time accurate since the 1970s. The last time that this sort of occurrence was observed was on New Year's Eve in 2016, when clocks paused for a second to allow the Earth to catch up.
Earth's Fastest Rotation
However, since 2020, experts have observed that the phenomenon has reversed, with the previous fastest day being -1.47 milliseconds on July 19 year. While humans can't detect the change, it could also affect satellites and navigation systems.
Experts said that the "Chandler Wobble," a change in the spin of the Earth on its axis, may be to blame for the incident. Dr. Leonid Zotov of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow, said that the normal wobble amplitude is about four meters at Earth's surface but disappeared from 2017 to 2020, as per Dailymail.
There are many other factors that can impact the length of Earth's days, including snow building up on the mountains in the northern hemisphere in winter and then melting in summer. Another factor is global warming which has been considered to have an effect by melting ice and snow at a faster pace.
In Paris, the International Earth Rotation Service monitors our planet's rotation and will tell countries when leap seconds must be added or taken away, giving them six months' notice. There is still no clear reason why the Earth's spin sometimes varies in speed.
According to NDTV, scientists speculate that this could be because of processes in the inner or outer layers of the core, oceans, tides, or even changes in climate. Some researchers also theorize that it could be related to the movement of Earth's geographic poles across its surface.
Negative Effects on Atomic Clock
Experts said that the Earth's increasing rate of spin leading to negative leap seconds could potentially confuse smartphones, computers, and communications systems. It was also reported that the leap second "mainly benefits scientists and astronomers" but is also a "risky practice that does more harm than good."
Due to the clock progressing from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before resetting to 00:00:00, a time jump can, therefore, crash programs and corrupt data due to the timestamps on the data storage. Meta also said that should a negative leap second occur, the clock will change from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00, Livemint reported.
Notably, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time, has already been updated with a leap second more than a dozen times. The negative leap seconds that some experts are recommending will be used to keep the rate at which the Earth orbits around the Sun consistent with measurements from atomic clocks, the Financial Express reported.
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