Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeeping
Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
What happened
So much polar ice is melting and flowing toward the equator that it's influencing how fast the Earth spins, complicating global timekeeping, said a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
Who said what
Human-caused "global warming is managing to actually measurably affect the rotation of the entire Earth," and that's "kind of amazing," said study author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The commentary
The Earth's rotation slowed for a long period, prompting authorities measuring time by the Earth's rotation — astronomical time — to add occasional "leap second[s]" to sync up with coordinated universal time (UTC), the atomic-clock-based standard since the 1960s, CNN said. But now the planet is spinning faster, necessitating subtracting a second. Agnew said this unprecedented "negative leap second" can wait until 2029, not 2026, due to the slowing effect of rising ocean levels.
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What next?
The rotational changes won't make the Earth "jerk to a halt, nor speed up so rapidly that everyone gets flung into space," The Washington Post said. But the "negative leap second" will be "a 'yikes' moment" for computer-based technology, University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos said to CNN.
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