A team of scientists from the University of California, San Diego, has presented groundbreaking research in the journal Nature, suggesting that the melting of polar ice caps could significantly affect the Earth’s rotational speed, thereby necessitating a recalibration of global time measurement.
The authors of the study posit that a slowdown in the planet’s core rotation, coupled with glacial melt, will lead to an unprecedented need to shorten, rather than extend, the length of a day by the end of this decade.
The research findings indicate that the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica will lead to a redistribution of mass from the poles towards the equator. This redistribution is expected to have a discernible impact on the rotation of the Earth, causing it to decelerate.
Since 1972, leap seconds have been periodically added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to accommodate minor variances in the Earth’s rotation and to maintain synchrony with atomic timekeeping. However, based on this study, scientists anticipate that in 2029, for the first time, it will become necessary to subtract a leap second from UTC.
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