Climate change: How it increases the length of the day

The consequences of climate change are unpredictable. One of them, according to analyses, is the lengthening of the day. This phenomenon is evidence of how the planet is being reshaped by human actions.

In addition to, Guardian articleThe change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds, but that is enough to disrupt Internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, which depend on precise timekeeping.

Planetary influence

The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the Moon’s gravitational pull on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-induced global warming has redistributed water stored at higher latitudes into the planet’s oceans.

As a result, there is more water in the seas near the equator. This makes the Earth more tilted – or fatter – which slows the planet’s rotation and makes the days longer.

Human impact on the planet has also been recently demonstrated by research showing that water redistribution has caused the Earth’s axis of rotation to shift – the North and South Poles. Other work has shown that human carbon dioxide emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

time distortion

“We can see our impact as humans on the entire Earth system. Not just locally, like increasing the temperature, but fundamentally, changing the way it moves through space and rotates,” said Professor Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Because of carbon dioxide emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the processes that governed it before have been happening for billions of years, and that is impressive.”

Human timekeeping relies on individual clocks, which are very accurate. However, the exact time of day—one rotation of the Earth—varies due to lunar tides, climatic influences, and other factors, such as the slow recovery of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of glaciers that formed during the last ice age.

These differences must be taken into account. “All data centers that run the internet, communications, and financial transactions rely on precise timing,” Suga said. “We also need precise timing for navigation, especially for satellites and spacecraft.”

Research Methodology

The search that Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of AmericaObservations and computer reconstructions were used to estimate the effect of diurnal ice melt. The rate of slowdown ranged from 0.3 to 1.0 milliseconds per century (msec/yr) between 1900 and 2000. But from 2000 onwards, as melting accelerated, the rate of change also accelerated to 1.3 msec/yr.

“This current rate is likely to be higher than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “It is expected to remain at about 1.0 milliseconds per year for decades to come, even if greenhouse gas emissions are significantly reduced.” If emissions are not reduced, the slowdown rate will rise to 2.6 milliseconds per year by 2100, they said. It surpasses lunar tides as the single largest contributor to long-term changes in day length.

“This study is a major advance,” said Dr. Santiago Belda of the University of Alicante in Spain, who was not part of the research team. “Because it confirms that the alarming loss of ice in Greenland and Antarctica is having a direct impact on the length of the day. This is causing our days to get longer. This change in the length of the day has crucial implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives.”