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

NBC News ^

[MNDude]

Global warming has slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation — and it could affect how we measure time.

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.

[Linda Tripp]

NBC says Earth is slowing. CBS says it going Faster. Fake News @ it’s Best.

[zeugma]

So, which is it?

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

or

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

[Georgia Girl 2]

Sure it is. 🙄

[LS]

Yet CBS says the earth is spinning faster due to global warming.

Competing Communist Broadcasting stories.

[Arkansas Toothpick]

Climate changers are on par with flat earthers when it comes to embracing pseudoscience.

[zeestephen]

quantim: "The Sun is about 1,000,000,000 times the Earth's mass..."

Hartley: "333,000 times, actually."

According to Wiki...

Sun Mass - 4.38 X 10 (to the 30th) Pounds

Earth Mass - 1.32 X 10 (to the 25th) Pounds

Is the next line below what your calculation looks like...

3.06 X 10 (to the 5th) - ???

I will guess that the precise radius of the sun has been the subject of disagreement for a couple of centuries?

The volume of the sun (as defined by radius?) is 1.3 million times larger than the Earth.

[chopperk]

Wait just one moment; Just read a Scientific Article that in five years Atomic Clocks will have to be adjusted one second because the earth is spinning faster. Who has been smoking what?

[From The Deer Stand]

Wikipedia says there were five major ice ages. Makes me wonder what warmed the Earth in between. No cow flatulence, no SUVs, no coal-fired plants.

[Myrddin]

An inescapable consequence of adding mass to the earth via coronal mass ejections from the sun is a slowing down of rotation and an increase in the distance around the sun. Much of the mass is deposited below the surface and causes the earth to "balloon" like an orange injected with vodka. The ballooning stretches the thin surface crust causing re-arrangements of bodies of land. None of that is surprising. It just takes place pretty slowly compared to the span of human life.

[USCG SimTech]

Cite the peer reviewed and universally accepted data and algorithms that support to prove this statement.

Betcha there isn’t any... at all.

[gundog]

I’ll finally get to use the speed adjustment on my clock?!

[ActresponsiblyinVA]

I predict there will be numerous terror attacks in the US before any of Obama’s waterfront mansions are flooded.

[grame]

CBS says earth is spinning faster and NBC says it’s going slower! Could they just make up their minds before they tr to sell us a bag of baloney?!?!

[PIF]

Earth is spinning faster than it used to. Clocks might have to skip a second to keep up.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4231515/posts

[Tudorfly]

Malarkey.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

(4.38 X 10^30) / 1.32 X 10^25 = 3.32 X 10^5, or close enough to 333,000.

For the sun to have one billion times the mass of the earth, even though it has 1.3 million times the volume of the earth, the sun would have to have an average density of nearly 770 times that of the earth. The average density of the sun is only 1.4, while the average density of the earth is 5.52.

[SunkenCiv]

• Earth is spinning faster than it used to. Clocks might have to skip a second to keep up. [04/16/2024]
• In the shadow of the Moon [08/31/2004]

[Fedora]

Original article here:

* * *

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07170-0

27 March 2024
A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming
Duncan Carr Agnew
Nature volume 628, pages333–336 (2024)

Abstract
The historical association of time with the rotation of Earth has meant that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) closely follows this rotation1. Because the rotation rate is not constant, UTC contains discontinuities (leap seconds), which complicates its use in computer networks2. Since 1972, all UTC discontinuities have required that a leap second be added3. Here we show that increased melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, measured by satellite gravity4,5, has decreased the angular velocity of Earth more rapidly than before. Removing this effect from the observed angular velocity shows that since 1972, the angular velocity of the liquid core of Earth has been decreasing at a constant rate that has steadily increased the angular velocity of the rest of the Earth. Extrapolating the trends for the core and other relevant phenomena to predict future Earth orientation shows that UTC as now defined will require a negative discontinuity by 2029. This will pose an unprecedented problem for computer network timing and may require changes in UTC to be made earlier than is planned. If polar ice melting had not recently accelerated, this problem would occur 3 years earlier: global warming is already affecting global timekeeping.

[Elsie]

Aint nobody duz!

[Elsie]

Big deal.

This is why we have things called leap seconds.

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