The Earth is speeding up.
It's literally spinning faster.
Could it cause a tech meltdown?
And what have melting glaciers got to do with it?
You may or may not know,
I mean I wouldn't expect you to know,
there are 86160 seconds in a day.
But scientists who measure time
have found that in 2021,
the average day is 0.05ms less than this.
That's because the Earth is literally
speeding up.
Ok, so you might think 0.05ms,
so what?
But this actually goes against everything
that we expect to see happen,
and scientists are desperately trying
to find an answer.
Because since its creation,
Earth's spin has actually been getting slower.
In a not very recent history
the days on Earth used to be twice as fast.
But what does a faster spinning Earth
actually mean?
3.5 billion years ago, the planet's
rotation used to be only 12 hours long.
At that kind of pace, life would really suck.
We'd have nightmarish weather patterns with
hurricanes tearing across the land.
Centrifugal force would pull water towards
the equator,
flooding entire regions like Indonesia
and the northern tip of South America.
Ok, that's a worst case scenario,
and Earth is unlikely to ever spin
that fast again.
But if we keep speeding up,
it could be bad in another way.
By 2030, there could be a full-scale
technological meltdown.
GPS relies on precision timing,
and if a day falls too far behind that
24 hour benchmark,
there could be disastrous consequences.
For one, satellites could lose
their correct place in the atmosphere,
and we'd lose all means of being able to
predict where they are in the sky.
If we leave this slip for too long
without correcting it,
then our navigation systems will be
completely wrong,
throwing all of our smart technology
off course.
Fortunately for us, we can
sidestep this disaster,
and there's a fairly easy workaround.
Timekeepers can add and take away
what's known as leap seconds to account
for these tiny differences.
They can alter what's known as
International Atomic Time,
which can be adjusted for the subtle
discrepancies between the Earth's rotation
and our clocks.
And what's pretty mind-blowing is that
by observing the night sky,
we can keep track of these tiny changes.
So keeping time is a pretty skilled art form.
That's how we know that the Earth is
spinning faster.
But that doesn't explain why,
despite billions of years of slowing down,
the Earth's rotation is speeding up.
So what's causing it?
This is Dr. Jazz Hill-Valler.
She's an expert in how the climate
affects the Earth's rotation.
So we probably all know that the melting ice
caps is going to cause sea levels to rise.
Well it's also causing the Earth to spin
faster. And what happens when the Earth spins
faster is that we get a greater centrifugal
force.
Imagine a figure skater.
When you watch figure skaters,
they start off spinning
really slow with their arms out,
and as they bring their arms in,
they start to turn faster and faster.
That's because they're
bringing more mass towards the centre of
their rotation.
So how can that happen on the Earth?
Well, water has this crazy property
where when it freezes, it actually expands.
So if you think about all of the glaciers and
the mountains and the ice sheets as being
these huge tall, towering sheets of ice.
Well, what would happen if we suddenly melted
them really quickly, which is something that
we're seeing happening at the moment?
If we take all of that mass in those glaciers
and those ice sheets and suddenly it melts and
gets closer and closer to the surface.
Just like the figure skater bringing their
arms in, all of that mass is going towards the
centre of rotation, meaning that the Earth is
gonna start spinning faster.
This meltwater currently sits at the poles.
This is why right now, scientists believe the
Earth is spinning faster than usual.
So will it get faster forever?
Here's the conundrum.
Actually, scientists expect this to be
just a blip.
Although it's been getting faster for
the last two years,
experts expect the Earth
to go back to its longer-term pattern of
slowing down.
And it's the Moon that's causing this.
This is to do with the tidal relationship
between the Moon and the Earth.
We only see one face of the moon.
It's tidally locked with the Earth.
So as the Earth is turning,
the moon is pulling the ocean towards it.
And then as we move away, the oceans go back
round and that causes our tides.
So this kind of wobbly dance between the
Moon and the Earth means that the Moon is
slowing down the Earth and all that energy
that's lost from the Earth slowing
in its rotation is getting
put into the Moon's orbit,
and the Moon is
actually moving further away.
As it continues to drift away,
the effect of the Moon's gravity on Earth
weakens, causing us in the longer term to
slow down.
What's more, over time, the melted water in the
polar regions could actually make the Earth
spin slower.
Some scientists believe that the water will
drift towards the equator, which will further
slow down the Earth's rotation.
This is called equatorial bulging.
Think of it as a big spare tyre around the
middle of the Earth.
It exists already down
to the centrifugal force exerted on the ocean
by Earth's rotation.
But adding to the weight of this tyre
is no good thing.
All of that excess water is gonna go and
sit around the equator,
which means that there's more mass further out
from the centre of rotation.
The equatorial bulge of water is gonna get
higher, which means that around the equator
there's going to be even higher sea levels
than we originally predicted.
It could mean that hurricanes and typhoons
and cyclones that form at the equator could
become more severe because there's more
water vapour there.
So the increased severity of these
storms because of the Earth's spinning
faster is probably only going to be
a temporary effect.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be
worried about it.
Because more severe storms means that
we're going to see more severe
natural disasters happening all over the
planet.
So although at first glance,
it doesn't seem that important that the
Earth is spinning a bit faster,
it really does matter.
Because it could be a big hint as to
what else the climate crisis has in store.