Earth has just recorded its shortest day - and the effects could be 'devastating'
Earth recorded its shortest day on record on June 29, completing one rotation in 1.59 milliseconds in under 24 hours.
Scientists aren’t sure what caused the slightly faster rotation, but speculate it could be related to climate change, tides, or even the Earth’s layers.
The irregular rotation created the need for something known as a leap second, a second added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which keeps our clocks as close to solar time – the movement of the sun – as possible.
Watch the latest News on Channel 7 or stream for free on 7plus >>
So far, Earth’s rotation has mostly slowed over time, so only positive leap seconds were added to the atomic clock to compensate, but it was only recently revealed that on June 29, Earth’s rotation was recorded to be spinning faster than usual.
“If Earth’s fast rotation continues, it could lead to the introduction of the first negative leap second,” a story published on the timeanddate website warns.
A negative leap second is a second taken from an atomic clock.
“This will be necessary to keep civil time — which is based on the beat of a very stable atomic clock — in line with solar time, which is based on the movement of the Sun across the sky.
“A negative leap second means our clock is past one second, which could potentially cause problems for IT systems,” says the time and date story.
Meta said in a blog post late last month, negative leap seconds can have a “devastating effect”.
That’s partly because some technological systems have the assumption that time is simply moving forward.
This IT system is likely to experience a massive outage if its internal clock needs to move backwards to keep up with Earth’s fast, irregular rotation.
“The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it can have a bad impact on software that relies on a timer or scheduler,” says Meta.
Meta says UTC has been changed 27 times with positive leap seconds, and also thinks this is more than enough to last through the millennium – calling for an end to adding leap seconds.
“Introducing a new leap second is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it’s time to introduce new technology to replace it,” the post reads.
In 2012, Reddit was inaccessible for up to 40 minutes after an outage caused by a leap second confusing the system timer.
“Both the jumps and the offsets they create are causing problems across the industry,” Meta wrote.
Why did that happen?
A group of scientists – Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard and Nikolay Sidorenkov – believe that the irregular rotation is caused by something called the Chandler Wobble.
They will speak at the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society’s annual meeting this week to suggest the theory.
The Chandler wobble describes the irregular movement of the Earth’s geographic poles across the world’s surface, according to time and date.
“The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about 3m to 4m at the Earth’s surface,” Zotov told timeanddate, “but from 2017 to 2020 it disappeared.”
The melting and refreezing of ice sheets on the world’s tallest mountains can contribute, and the phenomenon can be visualized by imagining a spinning figure skater slowing down when their arm is stretched and accelerating when their arm is inserted.
Friday’s record-breaking time is just one of several speed records set for Earth since 2020.
The Earth, over a long period of time, is actually slowing down – it takes a few milliseconds longer to complete its rotation every century.
Zotov told timeanddate that there’s a “70 percent chance” we’re already at the minimum length of the day and don’t need to introduce negative leap seconds, but no one knows for sure.
Engineers use dead spiders as creepy robots.
#Earth #recorded #shortest #day #effects #devastating
Comments
Post a Comment