According to a report by timeanddate, on June 29, 2022, Earth completed a rotation in 1.59 milliseconds, less than 24 hours, emphasizing a recent trend that has seen the planet’s rotation advance. In 2020, the Earth achieved its 28 shortest days since daily measurements have begun.
However, if this trend continues, it could lead to what is known as the ‘negative leap second’ in which clocks would potentially skip a second in order for civil time to keep pace with solar time. As timeanddate has pointed out, this could have repercussions for IT systems that rely on exact time measurements.
As also pointed out by timeanddate, at next week’s Asia Oceania Geosciences Society meeting, Christian Bizouard, Leonid Zotov, and Nikolay Sidorenkov are slated to explain another potential reason for this change: a variation in the Chandler wobble, which is the slight movement of Earth’s poles across the globe. “The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about three to four meters at Earth’s surface,” Dr. Zotov said, “but from 2017 to 2020, it disappeared.”
