Climate change delays Earth’s rotation and affects timekeeping

Due to variations in the Earth’s rotation speed, the The length of a day is rarely exactly 24 hours, causing the clock time to eventually not coincide with Earth time. To correct this discrepancy, the called intercalary second. This is the adding one second to the official standard time, UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Currently, the rate at which the Earth rotates is being affected by currents in the planet’s liquid core, which since the 1970s have increased the rotational speed of the outer crust. As a result, the additional intercalary seconds were less frequent and the The tendency was for a mid-second to need to be removed from UTC, something unheard of.

However, Agnew’s analysis concludes that this could happen later than expected because of climate change.

Data from satellites that map Earth’s gravity show that, since the early 1990s, the planet has become less spherical and more flattened, as ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted and moved water away from the poles toward the Equator. This flow of water away from the Earth’s axis of rotation slows down the planet’s rotation.

Agnew found that without the effect of melting ice, a negative intercalary second would be needed three years earlier than is now predicted.

Interim second is a problem for technology

Leap seconds are a big problem because they lead to serious failures in computing systems. An unprecedented negative interim second could be even worse.