Changes in the weather are beginning to impact the way people tell time.
The next leap second, which has been used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with ones based on Earth’s unstable rotation speed, will be delayed by three years, according to research by a geophysicist.
Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist in La Jolla, California, and the study’s author, said it is because the melting polar caps are slowing down the Earth’s spin to the point where we can calculate the change.
Our dependence on clocks and electronic devices, as well as our sense of time, may be threatened by the Earth’s changing rotation.
The slightly accelerated rotation of the Earth could require a negative “leap second,” or the skipping of one second, in 2029, according to research published in Nature magazine.
Physics, politics of global power, climate change, technology, and two separate timelines are all intertwined in this complicated issue. As the Earth’s rotation progressively slowed from 1972 to 2016, 27 leap seconds were introduced. On the other hand, the slowing rate was becoming less rapid. Earth’s speed increased from 2016 to 2018 due to a considerable decline in the rate of deceleration.
The Earth’s acceleration has been going on for around fifty years due to the unpredictable behavior of its boiling liquid core. However, this influence has been hidden by the fast polar ice loss since 1990.
Since Russia’s satellite system is highly dependent on astronomical time, as opposed to atomic time, researchers argue that eliminating leap seconds would cause problems.
To drastically decrease the possibility of such changes, world timekeepers have decided to update the criteria for adding or deleting a leap second beginning in the 2030s. By incrementally adding fractions of a second across a day, tech corporations such as Google and Amazon have put their systems in place to tackle the leap second issue.
