Earth completes its rotation in less than 24 hours, breaking record for shortest day again

You may be surprised to know that our planet earth is breaking its own record of rotation. The earth completed a full spin in 1.59 milliseconds less than its standard 24- hour rotation on July 29. The Independent claims that the planet’s speed has lately increased. The Earth experienced the shortest month ever in 2020, according to records going back to the 1960s. On July 19 of that year, scientists measured the shortest day ever. The difference between it and a usual 24-hour day was 1.47 milliseconds.

The globe continued to rotate at a typically faster rate the next year, but no records were broken. A 50-year era of shorter days, however, may be beginning right now, claims Interesting Engineering (IE) It is still unclear what is causing the Earth’s rotation to vary in speed. However, experts speculate that this may be caused by processes in the core’s inner or outer layers, seas, tides, or even shifts in the climate.

The “Chandler wobble,” or the shifting of the Earth’s geographic poles across its surface, is another theory put out by certain experts as to why this may be the case. Scientists Nikolay Sidorenkov, Christian Bizouard, and Leonid Zotov use the quiver that is present when a spinning top starts to accelerate or decelerate to explain this phenomenon.

According to the Independent, the Earth’s growing spin rate might result in the introduction of negative leap seconds in an effort to maintain the Earth’s orbital speed according to the measurement provided by atomic clocks. The negative leap second may have unfavourable implications for cell phones, computers, and communications networks. The publication cited a Meta blog in its story, which said that while the leap second “primarily benefits scientists and astronomers,” it is a “risky technique that does more harm than good.”

This is due to the fact that the time moves forward from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before resetting to 00:00:00. Because of the timestamps on the data storage, a time leap like this might cause programmes to crash and damage data. A negative leap second would shift the time from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00, according to Meta, and this might have a “devastating effect” on software that uses timers and schedulers.

In order to resolve this, according to IE, timekeepers throughout the world may need to add a “drop second”—a negative leap second. As a matter of fact, a leap second has previously been added 27 times to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the fundamental time reference used to govern clocks and time throughout the world.

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Earth completes its rotation in less than 24 hours, breaking record for shortest day again