REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — A recent study found that changes climate affects the speed of the Earth’s rotation and can impact the way we measure time.
Increased melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the world’s oceans, thereby redistributing water mass. This slightly slows down the Earth’s rotation. However, the planet is still spinning faster than usual.
The result is that global timekeeping may need to reduce one second in the next few years.
“Global warming has affected global timekeeping,” said the study, published in the journal Nature, as reported BBC, Wednesday (10/4/2024).
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is used by most of the world to set clocks and time, calculated based on the Earth’s rotation. However, the Earth’s rotation rate is not constant and therefore can affect the length of the day and night.
These changes to the planet’s outer core mean the Earth rotates slightly faster.
Since the 1970s, to correct for this, approximately 27 seconds of time have been added to the global clock, and timekeepers plan to subtract one second for the first time in 2026. This is known as a negative leap second.
However, this study found that the ice melting caused by climate change has kept pace with this acceleration.
The ice sheet is now losing mass five times faster than it was 30 years ago, meaning that a negative leap second change would not be necessary until 2029, according to the study.
“This is really impressive, even to me. We have done something that measurably changes how fast the Earth rotates. Something that has happened has never happened before,” said study author Duncan Agnew.
Negative leap seconds have never been used before, and according to the study, their use would cause unprecedented problems for computer systems around the world.
“This is unprecedented, and poses a major challenge to ensure that all parts of the global time infrastructure show the same time,” said Agnew, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
“Many computer programs for leap seconds assume that they are all positive, so they have to be reprogrammed,” he added.
However, there are some doubts about this research. Demetrios Matsakis, former chief scientist at the US Naval Observatory, said that Earth is too unpredictable to determine whether a negative leap second will be needed in the near future.
Human activities such as burning fossil fuels cause world temperatures to increase. This increase in temperature has a major impact on the environment, including the rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
2024-04-09 17:56:39
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