Earth’s rotation is doing something weird: it’s speeding up. Not by much. Just by milliseconds. But those little slices of time are setting off alarm bells in the world of atomic clocks and timekeeping agencies.
CNN reports that on July 10, Earth rotated in 1.36 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours. July 22 and August 5 are expected to be similarly short. This is part of a larger trend that’s been happening since 1972, when the Earth began subtly accelerating.
There are a few factors at play here. First, there’s the moon, whose tidal tug on our Earth can slow or speed up the planet. There are seasonal atmospheric shifts, like the jet stream moving further north or south. Another reason is buried deep within the earth: the molten core at the center of our planet is slowing down while the surface above it is speeding up. Even climate change is getting in on it, by melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica, shifting mass to the oceans, thus slowing us down just enough to offset the planet’s natural spin.
This all matters because time is not just a man-made construct, man. I mean, it is, and that stoner philosophy kind of way, but it’s also extraordinarily precise as it is governed by atomic clocks, which have been counting atomic oscillations with incredible precision since 1955.
These clocks define Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the time standard your phone relies on. But Earth’s irregular spin creates a drift between atomic time and solar time, and historically we’ve patched up with “leap seconds” — a little bit of soccer-style extra time that we tack on to a day every once in a while, to make all the math work out. We’ve added 27 of them since 1972.
But now the earth is speeding up so much, we might have to remove a second, which would be called a “negative leap second.” We’ve never had to do that before, and the official timekeepers of the world are just a little freaked out about its implications and implementation.
Removing a single second from our lives might sound like nothing, but some are worried that it could cause some real technological catastrophes, the way Y2K was predicted to way back when our calendars rolled from 1999 to 2000. Satellites, GPS systems, financial networks, and anything else that relies on down-to-the-second timekeeping could be affected.
It sounds like a lot of panic that will ultimately end up not coming to fruition, but that may not be the case. Back in 2016, an extra second added to our clocks did cause a little bit of a Y2K meltdown, just not one significant enough to bring on the end times.
Is this faster spin permanent? No one knows. Benedikt Soja, an engineer with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, told CNN it’s certainly possible that the planet could start speeding up again since all of this seems like it’s just part of the natural ebbs and flows of a planet’s life, but there’s no telling for sure. No one imagined we would ever have to actually implement a negative leap second in the first place.
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