We knew that climate change had an impact on the frequency of natural disasters, on the balance of biodiversity and even on our mental health. But few people suspected that it could have an impact on the length of days. And yet: according to a NASA study published on July 15 in the journal of theUnited States Academy of Sciences (PNAS), days would be 1.33 milliseconds longer than in 1900.
A phenomenon that could take several billion years before carbon emissions caused by human activities disrupt the climate and warm the oceans. This abnormally warm water infiltrates between the ice and the land on which the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps rest, causing the ice to melt at an accelerated rate. By changing to a liquid state, the water is distributed throughout the world’s oceans, and the new distribution of this mass from the poles to the equatorial zones causes an inertia phenomenon that slows down the Earth’s rotation speed.
A future at +2.62 milliseconds
And this acceleration in the lengthening of days is only just beginning: the study estimates that we could reach 2.62 additional milliseconds by 2100 if nothing is done to limit global warming… And that the melting of the ice has not yet reached a point of no return, as feared by other scientists behind a study published Tuesday, June 25 in Nature Geosciencewhere they claim that a new ” tipping point » could soon be crossed, precipitating the ice caps towards a ” uncontrolled melting ».
A change that could have gone unnoticed by humanity, if the latter were not so addicted to digital technology. Indeed, these few milliseconds of lag could impact, in the long term, all our technologies based on precise timing such as GPS, Internet, or even financial transaction services.
