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Image Courtesy: Getty Images (Earth’s Rotation)
Climate change is resulting in polar ice melt in large scale that it’s decreasing the speed of Earth’s rotation and — here’s the kicker — it will change our method of how we measure time in the future.
That’s the disrespectful conclusion that Duncan Agnew, geophysicist and professor at University of California, San Diego, reached by examining data from satellite imagery, as given in a latest research published in the journal Nature.
Firstly, as polar ice melts into the ocean, there’s less mass overall at the poles and the center of the planet becomes a quite heavier, hence slowing down Earth’s rotation.
“If you have a [figure] skater who begins spinning, if she lowers down her arms or stretches out her legs, she will slow down,” Agnew told NBC News, with the help of ice skating as an analogy to what’s wrong with Earth’s rotational velocity.
And that creates a issue for the measurement of time itself. If Earth’s rotation is slowing down, that means timekeepers all around the world will have to manage. This would influence far beyond our watches. It effects the working of satellites, computers, financial institutions and everywhere else where every second counts.
Institutions will likely have to manage. The global time standard, called Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, similar to the Earth’s rotation — but because the rotation velocity can be variable, this has at times involve timekeepers to add or remove a leap second to the clock, Agnew describes in his paper.
After figuring out numbers, Agnew came to the conclusion that if polar ice did not melt, we would have had to remove a second from clocks all over the world by 2026. But because of ice melt slowing down Earth’s rotation, this time change may come instead in 2029, he added.
“It’s type of magnificent, even to me, we’ve done something that measurably changes how speedily the Earth rotates,” said Agnew to NBC News. “Things are occurring that are beyond our expectations.”
