What happened
So much polar ice is melting and flowing toward the equator that it’s influencing how fast the Earth spins, complicating global timekeeping, said a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
Who said what
Human-caused “global warming is managing to actually measurably affect the rotation of the entire Earth,” and that’s “kind of amazing,” said study author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The Earth’s rotation slowed for a long period, prompting authorities measuring time by the Earth’s rotation — astronomical time — to add occasional “leap second[s]” to sync up with coordinated universal time (UTC), the atomic-clock-based standard since the 1960s, CNN said. But now the planet is spinning faster, necessitating subtracting a second. Agnew said this unprecedented “negative leap second” can wait until 2029, not 2026, due to the slowing effect of rising ocean levels.
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What next?
The rotational changes won’t make the Earth “jerk to a halt, nor speed up so rapidly that everyone gets flung into space,” The Washington Post said. But the “negative leap second” will be “a ‘yikes’ moment” for computer-based technology, University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos said to CNN.
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