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According to a new study published in the journal Nature, the climate crisis has progressed so far It affects the shape and rotation of our planet, and even changes our perception of time.
“Enough ice has melted to raise sea levels enough to significantly affect the Earth's rotation rate,” Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an author on the study, told Nature.
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No thanks necessary. Such a change in the Earth's rotation would not be catastrophic. However, this means that we will have to correct our time, which can be a problem for many computers.
Subtract seconds due to melting glaciers
People measure time in seconds, minutes, and hours, and these measurements are dictated by the Earth's rotation on its axis and the position of the sun in the sky, which is called solar time.
However, solar time is not very accurate because the planet's rotation was never constant. It changes depending on how fluids move above and below the Earth's crust.
Therefore, humans invented a more accurate way to measure time using atomic clocks and the atomic time scale.
On average, every year and a half, there is a discrepancy between these two time scales due to the Earth's unstable rate of rotation. When this happens, we use what is called a leap second: a second added to the atomic time scale to bring it in line with the solar time scale.
This is how we add leap seconds since 1972, but since 2016 there has been no such need.
This is because the Earth has been rotating faster and faster over the past eight years for reasons that scientists are still trying to understand.
As a result, scientists predict that by 2026 we will need the first second negative jump in history. This means that we would have to subtract a second from the atomic time scale, rather than add it.
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However, new research suggests that climate change will slow the acceleration of the Earth's rotation and delay the second negative jump until 2029.
Losing one second may not seem like a big deal. But adding and subtracting leap seconds creates such significant mathematical problems that the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has voted to eliminate them by 2035.
According to the office, computers, financial exchanges, GPS and spaceflight depend on extremely precise time measurement, so leap seconds can lead to “serious failures in critical digital infrastructure.” She added that a negative leap second, which may soon be necessary, “was never predicted or experienced.”
-We do not know how to deal with the loss of one second. That's why horologists are worried, Felicitas Arias, former director of the time division at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, told Nature.
While Agnew's study estimates that we may have more time before we encounter this troubling unknown, it should be noted that the Earth's rotation is extremely difficult to predict, and the new study is not necessarily a definitive prediction.
“There's a lot of confusion about this,” Judah Levin, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told The Washington Post. “A few years ago, something completely different would have been expected,” he noted.
How does melting ice slow down Earth's rotation? The movement of fluids in Earth's oceans and molten core, as well as changes in ice caps, affect the planet's rotation.
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There are three main mechanisms that affect the Earth's rotation:
- One is tidal force, the interaction between moving ocean water and the ocean floor that slows the Earth's rotation.
- The second is changes in the ice sheets that covered northern Canada and Scandinavia during the last ice age, making the Earth more spherical, which Agnew said accelerated its rotation.
- Finally, the magma streams within the Earth's liquid core change irregularly, causing it to spin faster or slower and thus changing the rotation of the entire planet.
But scientists have now turned their attention to a fourth factor: weather changes.
As average global temperatures rise, polar ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, spilling water into the oceans. As this meltwater moves from the Arctic toward the equator, this process raises sea levels and causes devastating coastal flooding, and our planet becomes a little wider, slowing its rotation.
Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia.
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Martin Prochazkach/Shutterstock
You can imagine an ice skater spinning with her arms above her head. Now imagine that he lowers his arms and extends them out to the sides, slowing the rotation. The expansion of the Earth's equator has a similar effect on rotation.
“For me, the fact that humans have changed the Earth's rotation is amazing,” Agnew said in an interview with CNN.
We may have been able to avoid huge clouds of wildfire smoke, historic floods and devastating heatwaves so far. However, a new study confirms that the climate crisis is affecting even everyday aspects of our lives. No one can escape time.
The text is a translation from the American edition of Business Insider magazine.
Translated by: Matthews Albin
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