The Earth is spinning faster – it can lead to big problems

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Do you feel like the day is passing by? Perhaps not by chance. The Earth began to spin faster, and this summer it broke a new record.

Even if the margins are tiny, it can make a huge difference in how time is calculated — and cause sites to crash.

On June 29 this summer, the Earth was in a hurry. Instead of the usual 24 hour rotation time, the planet took 1.59 milliseconds. And this wasn’t the first time our planet was spinning faster than usual.

– It’s been going on for quite some time. The Earth has accelerated significantly since 2015. The day in question was slightly shorter than the day before and the day after, although it wasn’t as dramatic, says Judah Levine, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, who, among other things, is working to determine American Standard Time.

How was this discovery made? High-precision atomic clocks are regularly compared with the speed of Earth’s rotation. It is, in turn, calculated using radio telescopes around the world, which measures the time of arrival of radio signals from various stars, which can be used to measure the angle of the Earth.

Surprise

Why the Earth suddenly picked up speed is somewhat unclear. For Fred Watson, professor and advisor to the Australian government on astrological matters, the day of fasting came as a surprise.

We know that in the long run, the turnover slows down. That’s why we sometimes introduce leap seconds. Much of this drop is due to the Moon’s gravitational pull on Earth, as the Moon takes energy from Earth.

This effect, in turn, causes the Moon to be pushed away from the Earth, about 3.78 cm per year.

Several factors may explain the sudden increase in circulation. Among other things, it concerns the relationship between the planet and its atmosphere, between the outer part of the planet and its essence. Global warming as the polar ice caps melt could also have an effect.

The Earth is not spherical. It has a liquid interior and a movable cover with the crust on top. When you also add fluid at the surface, with the oceans, the atmosphere moving around and affecting a lot, you can see these fluctuations, Watson says.

It is clear that a person does not notice the accelerated rotation, not even in the long run. The problem is that it has been decided internationally that the calculation of our time, which usually follows atomic clocks, must correspond to the rotation of the Earth.

If you don’t do something about it, the Earth will be out of sync with the atomic clocks, and international legislation today means that if they differ by more than a second, you have to adjust them, says Watson.

The negative leap comes in second

In recent decades – when the Earth was spinning slower – it was resolved in leap seconds. To date, 37 leap seconds have been introduced since 1972. In practice, the clocks tick 23.59.59, 23.59.60, 0.00.00, etc.

The first time was ten leap seconds, and another 27 seconds since then, explains Levine.

Now, instead, it may happen that a second peel may have to be made in a few years, if the Earth continues to spin faster than before.

We may have to introduce a negative leap second in six to seven years, but that’s a big doubt, says Levine.

It has never happened before, and even ordinary leap seconds are in some ways a disaster, particularly in the tech world. According to Meta (formerly Facebook), leap seconds lead to crashes and corrupted data. For example, Reddit and Linkedin crashed when introducing a leap second in 2012, and the same thing happened to Instagram and Netflix in 2015. Twitter had problems with timing errors when users tweeted.

It’s unclear how negative leap seconds can affect, but Meta warns of “disruptive effects on software that depends on clocks.”

“Those who manage the hardware infrastructure suffer every second,” wrote the company that simply wanted to scrap the system.

“without discussions”

Levine says tech companies’ way of solving the leap second problem is the culprit in the drama. Different tech giants have chosen different methods, including “extracting” the extra second over a longer period. On Meta – as the method is called – the second method is distributed over 17 hours to avoid collision. Other companies use other technologies.

These methods were invented by some companies, which is unfortunate, says Levine and continues:

– They have decided what is best for them without discussions about what is best from an international perspective.

But why should we care about leap seconds? Just over half a minute in 50 years doesn’t affect any normal person.

Levin agrees.

– But international time is also used for navigational and astronomical purposes, and is the link between time and the position of the Earth.

Accurate tables

The positions of the various celestial bodies are entered into very accurate tables, and they quickly become inaccurate if time – or rather the day – starts to run away. In the end, we will encounter two completely different standard times.

So it’s important to have a correlation between astronomical time and atomic time, and without leap seconds, that link is gradually being severed, and there is a whole class of applications and publications that would be destroyed by such a solution, says Levine.