Earth is rotating faster, so world clocks lose seconds

In the near future, clocks will skip a second as a result of climate change and geological shifts which will cause the rotation of the earth to adjust, resulting in the Earth going through changes in rotation over time.

In the near future, a new study published in Nature journal suggests that it could be necessary for clocks to skip a second, which is known as a “negative leap second”, due to the accelerating rate of technological progress.

It has been warned that such changes in Earth’s rotation could result in an adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), an international time zone that is used to set all time zones all over the planet, earlier than originally planned, in response to a warning by a study.

It is important to note that the implications of this adjustment go far beyond the adjustment of timekeeping, since this could pose an “unprecedented problem for computer network timing.“.

Anadolu Agency reported that the Earth’s rotation is now fluctuating, which is causing leap seconds to be adjusted to align atomic and astronomical time, leading to an adjustment in leap seconds.

Over the period 1972-2016, 27 leap seconds were added to the Earth’s rotation to compensate for the Earth’s slowing rotation.

However, the Earth’s rotation was actually speeding up, as the rate of slowing was tapering off to the point where the Earth’s rotation was actually slowing down.

In addition, recent observations suggest that this is being offset due to the rapid melting of ice at the poles since 1990, which is a consequence of climate change. As the ice melts from the poles to the bulging center, the Earth’s mass is shifted, resulting in a slowdown of the rotation of the planet.

As a result, timekeepers have planned to revise leap second standards in the 2030s in order to minimise the number of frequent adjustments and maintain synchronization across various timekeeping systems.

Timenews1 provided that news.