Length of days on Earth are increasing and 'unprecedented' climate change is to blame
Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Science, Earth
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: Getty/Wirestock/Getty/Bjorn Holland
Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Science, Earth
The length of a day on our planet is increasing, but not in a good way.
Due to the rise in water levels a day on planet Earth is now longer than it used to be.
Let's get into it.
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Climate change has impacted the world massively - we're seeing hotter temperatures resulting in unbearable heatwaves and wildfires, more severe storms including powerful hurricanes, and intense droughts.
And according to a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the length of day is getting longer too.
Researchers have studied the rising sea levels, caused due to a significant rise in temperatures across the globe which has subsequently meant polar ice caps have melted.
Well, we all know that a day consists of 24 hours which in essence is 86,400 seconds long, but it is getting very slightly longer.
A new study titled The increasingly dominant role of climate change on length of day variations has explained why this is happening.
Benedikt Soja, with the help of researchers Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, Surendra Adhikari, Mathieu Dumberry, Siddhartha Mishra, concluded that the melting ice caps are changing the Earth's axis of rotation by redistributing mass around the planet, and ultimately slowing it down.
Soja wrote: "Modern climate change is unprecedented. In recent decades, it has accelerated the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets, leading to a rise in sea level.
"This pole-to-equator mass transport has significantly increased the Earth’s oblateness and length of day (LOD) since 1900. We show that the present rate of increase is higher than at any point in the 20th century.
"Under high emission scenarios, the climate-induced LOD rate will continue to increase and may reach a rate that is twice as large as at present, surpassing the impact of lunar tidal friction.
"These findings signify the unprecedented effect of climate change on planet Earth and have implications for precise timekeeping and space navigation, among others."
The study used observations and computer reconstructions to analyze and assess how melting ice is impacting how long a day is.
And they found that the rate of slowing hovered between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000, but since the turn of the century the rate has accelerated to 1.3 ms/cy.
Soja added: "Projections of future climate warming under high emission scenarios suggest that the climate-induced LOD rate may reach 2.62 ± 0.79 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tidal friction as the single most important contributor to the long-term LOD variations."