While the Earth had its shortest day since the establishment of the atomic clock standard in 1970 on June 29 — 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours — experts believe this is a natural variation.
Nonetheless, word of the rapid rotation led to erroneous social media postings about the measurement’s importance, prompting others to express alarm about its ramifications.
“They broke the news of the planet spinning faster, which seems like it should be larger news,” one tweet, which was retweeted almost 35,000 times, stated. “At this point, we’re so accustomed to disaster that it’s like, okay, what’s next?”
Some Twitter users replied to these comments with jokes and doubt regarding the measurement’s size. Others, on the other hand, expressed concern about how it might effect them.
However, experts informed the Associated Press that the Earth’s rotating speed changes regularly and that the record-breaking reading is nothing to be concerned about.
“It’s entirely typical,” said Stephen Merkowitz, a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientist and project manager. “This has nothing amazing or unique about it. It’s not such an extraordinary data point that all scientists will wake up and wonder, “What’s going on?””
This opinion was shared by Andrew Ingersoll, an emeritus professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.
“The Earth’s rotation fluctuates by milliseconds for a variety of causes,” he said in an email to the Associated Press. “There is nothing to be concerned about.”
The minor increase in rotational speed also does not imply that days are passing more quickly. Merkowitz noted that standardized time was formerly established by the time it takes the Earth to spin once on its axis, which was popularly assumed to be 24 hours. However, since the pace varies somewhat, that number may change by milliseconds.
In the 1960s, scientists started using atomic clocks to more precisely measure time. According to Merkowitz, the official length of a day currently compares the speed of one complete revolution of the Earth to the time taken by atomic clocks. If such measurements go too far apart, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which keeps track of world time, may correct the problem by adding a leap second.
Some engineers are opposed to the implementation of a leap second because it might cause large-scale and disastrous technological concerns. Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi, Meta developers, made a blog entry about it for Meta, which is supporting an industry-wide campaign to prevent future leap seconds from being introduced.
“Negative leap second handling has long been supported, and firms like Meta often perform simulations of this situation,” they told CBS News. “However, it has never been validated on a broad scale and will very certainly result in unanticipated and disastrous outages over the globe.”
According to Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, despite recent declines in the length of a day, days have really been increasing longer over the period of many centuries. He noted that the present trend was unexpected, but that it is nothing to be concerned about.
Many factors affect Earth’s rotation, including effects from other planets and the moon, as well as how the Earth’s mass redistributes itself. Merkowitz cites melting ice sheets and meteorological events that generate a denser atmosphere as examples.
However, the kind of event that would shift enough mass to influence the Earth’s rotation in a manner that is noticeable to humans would be something catastrophic, such as the planet being struck by a massive asteroid, according to Merkowitz.
Caitlin O’Kane assisted with this story.