Drastic polar ice melt is slowing Earth’s rotation, counteracting a speedup from the planet’s liquid outer core. The upshot is that we mig

Global Warming Is Slowing the Earth’s Rotation

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2024-03-29 13:30:04

Drastic polar ice melt is slowing Earth’s rotation, counteracting a speedup from the planet’s liquid outer core. The upshot is that we might need to subtract a leap second for the first time ever within the decade

As rising global temperatures melt Earth’s polar ice sheets, the shifting water is creating such a huge redistribution of our planet’s mass that its rotation speed is dropping. This unusual result of climate change is interacting with other forces that affect the planet’s rotational speed in ways that could ultimately even alter the way we keep time. In just a few years, we may have to make the first-ever deletion of a “leap second”—according to a new study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“This is another one of those ‘this has never happened before’ things that we’re seeing from global warming: the idea that this effect is large enough to change the rotation of the entire Earth,” says study co-author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.