Climate change is making the day longer

Man-made pollution is impacting more than scientists have thought.

Anna Nix
16th September 2024
Image credit: Pixabay, WikiImages, Pfuderi

Climate change is impacting everything from weather to wildlife and nature. Scientists are now finding that it is impacting time.

The National Academy of Sciences has discovered that our days are getting longer due to climate change. For now, it is only milliseconds a day, but it can severely impact computing systems.

The melting of polar ice caps, which have started to cause the rise of sea levels, are also behind the change in a day’s length. Polar ice is melting as the world’s temperature is increasing, a phenomenon, which is scientifically agreed as caused by humans.

As the ice caps are melting the water flows to the equator and ultimately change’s the planet’s shape. It is flattening Earth at poles and making it bulge in the middle, which slows her rotation.   

The time it takes for Earth to rotate is impacted by processes in the planet’s fluid core, melting of ice caps since the last ice age, the moon and most recently melting ice caps due to climate change.

The fluid core, the moon and melting ice caps all impact how the earth rotates whether faster of slower. Therefore all these factors have slowed the rotation of the earth meaning the days are getting longer.

However, the moon for a millennia, has been the dominating factor of the change in a day’s length. It prolongs the day by a few milliseconds per century as it pulls Earth and causes oceans to gravitate towards it, which slows Earth’s rotation.

Now, a man-caused global warming, and its subsequent melting of ice caps, is altering the way Earth moves more than factors which have worked for billions of years.

The change, which is barely noticeable by humans, will impact systems such as GPS, which rely on precise atomic time that is based on the frequency of certain atoms. UTC (Coordinated universal time) also relies on the precise time.

The length of a day has previously varied between 0.3 and 1 millisecond in the 20th century, which was caused by climate change-fuelled rising of sea levels, whereas in the past two decades, scientists calculated an increase of 1.33 milliseconds per century in a day’s length.

If pollution, which heats the Earth continues to rise, the length of a day could increase by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century, which would completely overtake the natural impact of the moon.

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