Melting polar ice caps has worrying impact on length of Earth year

With the current melting rate, the leap second, which is scheduled to be removed from Coordinated Universal Time in 2026 to keep it in line with the Earth’s rotation, won’t be needed until 2029, says geophysicist Duncan Agnew of the University of California, San Diego.

Detail

The passage of time may not seem like a big deal. It’s only a second after all. But global timekeeping is an extremely precise and meticulous field that relies on many fields and technologies, from communications to network computing to financial markets. Additionally, a large mass is needed to change the Earth’s rotation. This result is a sad indicator of how serious the situation has become.

If the melting of the polar ice caps didn’t accelerate soon, the problem [додаткової секунди] It could have happened 3 years ago. Global warming is already affecting global timing,
– writes Agnyu in his article.

Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is an extremely precise system based on atomic clocks around which all other clocks are adjusted.

Because the Earth’s rotation is not constant, a precise chronometer such as an atomic clock will eventually fall behind the time we keep on Earth. Therefore, a leap second is occasionally added to UTC to equalize its relationship with International Atomic Time, or TAI.

We haven’t needed a leap second adjustment since 2016, but the possibility of a negative leap second has some people worried about the impact it will have on our technology.

Agnew notes: “Many systems now have software that can accept an extra second, but only a few allow you to subtract a second, so a negative leap second is expected to cause a lot of trouble”.

Since strange things have been happening with the Earth’s rotation lately, Agnew decided to look at its angular velocity on a larger scale; how its spin has changed in recent years and the mass distribution on its surface.

Earth’s gravity is constantly monitored by satellites orbiting the Earth, measuring changes in their orbits and distances between them, as they are affected by regional gravitational changes on the Earth’s surface. Since gravity is directly related to mass, this can reveal where mass is concentrated..

Agnew studied changes in the Earth’s gravitational field and measured the planet’s rotation rate. discovered this Melting glaciers significantly affects the rotation of the planet. As ice in Greenland and Antarctica melts, it flows into the oceans, redistributing mass and slightly altering the planet’s rotation.