Accelerating ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the planet’s oceans, redistributing its mass.
As a result of the rate at which the ice melts, the speed of the Earth’s rotation is affected, and this could affect how we measure time, according to a study made public.
The redistribution of mass caused by the flow of huge volumes of water into the oceans slows the Earth’s rotation very slightly. But then again, the planet is still spinning faster than ever.
Because of this phenomenon, universal timekeepers may need to subtract a second from our clocks later than they would otherwise.
“Global warming is already affecting the measurement of time on a global scale,” says the study, which was published in the journal Nature.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – used by most of the world to set clocks and keep time – is calculated based on the rotation of the planet.
The Earth’s rotation rate, however, is not constant and can therefore affect how long our days and nights last. Changes to the planet’s fluid core have caused the Earth to spin slightly faster.
Since the 1970s, in order to correct this, 27 seconds have been added to the world clock, with timekeepers planning to remove a second for the first time in 2026.
But melting ice caused by climate change has partially offset this acceleration, according to the study’s findings. The various ice sheets are now losing mass five times faster than 30 years ago, meaning not a second will need to be removed before 2029, the research points out.
“It’s impressive that we’ve done something that measurably changes how fast the Earth spins,” study author Duncan Agnew told NBC News.
“Unprecedented situations are being recorded.”
The time-out has not been implemented before, and according to the study, resorting to this measure “would be an unprecedented problem” for computing systems around the world.
“It’s unprecedented and a significant challenge to ensure that all systems in the global timekeeping infrastructure are showing the same time,” said Duncan Agnew, who works as a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
“A lot of calculators that factor in the extra seconds assume they’re all positive, so these will have to be rewritten,” he added.
The study, however, is viewed by some with skepticism.
Dimitrios Matsakis, former head of the US Naval Observatory’s time services science group, told AFP that “the Earth is too unpredictable to be sure” that a second would need to be removed in the near future.
Human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global temperatures to rise. This rise has a huge effect on the environment, including the occurrence of extreme weather events, such as the torrential rains that hit Dubai a few days ago, where it experienced the heaviest rainfall in 75 years, with 100 mm of rain falling in just 12 hours, ie about as much rain as normally falls in a year.
One of the most important problems, however, is considered to be the melting of the ice, as the continuous rise in sea levels and the rise in temperatures recorded for a prolonged period in them, threaten coastal metropolitan centers. About 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast.
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