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Analysis shows that the climate crisis is causing massive melting of polar ice, changing the shape of the Earth and lengthening the length of the day.
Scientists said the phenomenon was a striking example of how human actions are changing the planet, and paralleled natural processes that have existed for billions of years.
The length of a day can change in milliseconds, but internet traffic, financial transactions, and GPS Navigation is all about accurate timekeeping.
The length of the Earth’s day has increased steadily over geological time due to the gravitational action of the Moon on the Earth’s oceans and land masses. However, Greenland And man-made global warming is causing the Antarctic ice sheets to collapse, redistributing water stored at higher latitudes into the world’s oceans, and putting more water closer to the equator, making the Earth flatter (or fatter), slowing its rotation, and making days longer.
Humanity’s impact on the Earth has been recent. the study Water redistribution Caused the rotation of the Earth on its axis The North and South Poles may shift. Other studies have shown that Carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.
“Humans’ impact on the Earth system as a whole is very visible, not just in local effects like rising temperatures, but also in fundamentally changing the way it moves in space and rotates on its axis,” said Benedikt Soja, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, one of the world’s top universities for science and technology. “With our carbon dioxide emissions, we’ve achieved this in just 100 or 200 years, which is surprising since the dominant processes before that had been going on for billions of years.”
Human timekeeping is based on extremely accurate atomic clocks, but the exact length of a day (one rotation of the Earth) varies with other factors, such as lunar tides, climatic influences, and the slow recovery of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of ice sheets that formed during the last ice age.
These differences must be taken into account, Soja says: “All the data centers that run the internet, communications, and financial transactions depend on precise timing. Navigation, especially satellites and spacecraft, also requires precise time knowledge.”
“Thanks to our carbon emissions, we’ve managed to do this in just 100 or 200 years, which is amazing, considering that the governance process that preceded it lasted billions of years.”
research, Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesused observations and computer reconstructions to assess the impact of ice melt on day length. Between 1900 and 2000, the rate of ice melt varied between 0.3 and 1.0 milliseconds per century. However, since 2000, Melting acceleratesThe rate of change has also accelerated to 1.3 milliseconds per century.
“This current rate is likely faster than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “Even if greenhouse gas emissions are severely curbed, the rate is projected to remain at about 1.0 milliseconds per century for the next few decades.” If emissions are not reduced, the rate of deceleration will increase to 2.6 milliseconds per century by 2100, surpassing lunar tides as the largest driver of long-term variation in day length, the researchers said.
“This study is a major advance as it confirms fears about ice loss in Greenland and the Arctic,” said Dr Santiago Verda, from the University of Alicante in Spain, who was not part of the research team. Antarctica Our suffering will have a direct impact on day length, which will make the days longer. This change in day length will have profound implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that dominate modern life.”
