Earth is spinning faster than it used to. Clocks might have to skip a second to keep up.

CBS News ^

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks LiM.

https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1203912/posts?page=33#33

[gitmo]

We get an extra second’s sleep some night in 2029! I can’t wait.

[21twelve]

“They have had to add leap seconds in the past due to slight slowing in the spin of Earth. So this would just be removing one that had previously been added.”

While it is no surprise that the spin rate might vary, it also wouldn’t surprise me if they just got the previous calculation wrong.

Years ago my son asked my wife what Leap Day was after hearing about it. I suppose he was about 5 years old. She explained how February gets an extra day every 4 years because our calendars are based on a 365 day year, but the earth really takes about 365.25 days to go around the sun.

So that quarter of a day gets added up every four years to make a full extra day. And they put it at the end of February because that is the shortest month, and call it Leap Day. And that year is called a Leap Year.

“No, really mom. Why do they call it Leap Day.”

[M Kehoe]

Just to let you know, I told the First lady I felt the extra second. She did too, and said, “thank you Lord.”

5.56mm

[21twelve]

I read a very interesting book on Emelia Earhart. It was the books reasoning (well researched) that she was lost due to her unfamilarity with her communications system (she would switch it between radio and telegraph every half-hour in case there was a failure with one of the systems) AND the lack of a common time frame. She was on one time (her last take off location), a telegraph ship near Howland Island was on Hawaii time (which was a 1/4 hour off of the other times!), and then there was Howland Island time. After the investigation they created the Greenwich Mean Time standard.

[ComputerGuy]

I knew the days were going by faster than they used to.

[Kenny Bania]

[Political Junkie Too]

One study in Nature by Duncan Agnew.

Two articles on the study from the LAAP-dog media, one from NBC and one from CBS.

NBC News: Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth's rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping

Excerpt:

A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise.

CBS News: U.S. Earth is spinning faster than it used to. Clocks might have to skip a second to keep up.

Excerpt:

For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a "negative leap second" — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.

That's global warming for you...

-PJ

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

That’s interesting, but GMT goes back at least to the middle of the 19th Century. Originally GMT time zero ( 00:00 HR) indicated NOON on the Greenwich meridian. This allowed all the observations made by an astronomer in Europe during a single night to occur on the same day, GMT. One vestige of that is that the astronomical “Julian Day” still begins at noon, Greenwich time. January 1, 2000 12:00 TT is Julian Day 2451545.000000. (TT is Terrestrial Dynamical Time, used for astronomical calculations. It does not observe leap seconds either.) On January 1, 2000, TT was 64.184 seconds ahead of GMT (or UTC). TT and GMT agreed some time around 1900, ignoring the 12 HR offset of GMT prior to 1925.

In 1925 that was changed so that 00:00 HR GMT would be MIDNIGHT on the Greenwich meridian. GMT was the time zone used in the Nautical Almanac. The Nautical Almanac was a joint publication of Her Britannic Majesty’s Royal Greenwich Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, until quite recently. Publishing the Almanac involved a lot of tedious calculation, especially in the days of logarithm tables. The two organizations split the observing and calculating chores. Britain closed the RGO about 20 years ago, and withdrew from publishing around the same time.

It was the Nautical Almanac that lead to the adoption of the Greenwich meridian as the Prime Meridian of the World. Other countries, especially France, published perfectly good almanacs, but the quality of the explanations and general accuracy and thoroughness of the US-British volume made it the choice of most mariners and lead to the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian at the Washington Conference of 1884.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference

[SunkenCiv]

[Ezekiel]

Thanks for that time stamp. I bookmarked it.

Looks great, love the simple design and clarity. Time.gov. The opposite of what to expect from a government-run operation.

Looks more like something on the wall of a kindergarten classroom.

[gleeaikin]

Could the earth have been jolted one minute shift by that huge volcano Hunga Tanga two years ago? Could that also be the cause of the unusual drought, fire, and flood patterns the past 2 years?