Earth Completes Rotation In Less Than 24-Hours, Smashes Record Again For Shortest Day
On July 29, the Earth broke its record for the shortest day by completing a complete rotation in 1.59 milliseconds less than the standard 24-hour rotation.
According to the Independent newspaper, the planet has increased its speed recently. In 2020, the Earth experienced the closest moon on record since 1960. On July 19 of that year, the closest time was measured. That’s 1.47 millimeters shorter than a typical 24-hour day. The following year, the planet continued to run at the same speed overall, but did not break any records. However, according to Interesting Engineering (IE), a 50-year trend of shorter days may begin now.
The reason for the different speeds of the Earth’s rotation is still unknown. But scientists think it could be due to internal or surface processes, the sea, tides or even climate change.
Some researchers believe that it may be related to the movement of the Earth’s poles across its surface, known as the “Chandler Oscillation”. Simply put, it’s like the arrow you see when a rotating surface starts to accelerate or decelerate, according to scientists Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard and Nikolay Sidorenkov.
According to the Independent newspaper, if the world continues to run at an increasing speed, this may lead to the introduction of negative leap seconds, in an effort to maintain the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun as measured by the atomic clock.
However, the second negative increase will have complicated consequences for smartphones, computers and communication systems. Citing the Meta blog, the outlet reported that the secondary expansion “benefits scientists and astronomers in a fundamental way” but is a “dangerous practice that does more harm than good.” good.”
In fact, the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before returning to 00:00:00. Time jumps like this can cause program crashes and corrupt data due to timestamps in the database.
Meta also said that if a negative increase of two occurs, the clock will jump from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00, and this could have a “devastating effect” on the software. rely on timers and schedulers. According to IE, to solve this problem, global timekeepers can add a second negative extension – “second fall”.
Notably, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the world’s primary time standard used to control clocks and time, has been updated 27 times by the second.
