On Tuesday, July 26, researchers recorded a new world record showing that the planet is spinning faster than ever before, making the days shorter. Using precise calculations and atomic clocks, scientists noticed the change in time with the shortest day to date. However, scientists then noted that despite this record, the Earth may slow down, making the days longer.
Matt King and Christopher Watson of the University of Tasmania wrote: “But despite this record, that steady speed has curiously turned into a slowdown since 2020 – the days are getting longer again and the reason is a mystery until now.”
The Earth does not take exactly 24 hours to rotate on its axis, it usually varies very little, with even events such as earthquakes affecting this time.
Professors King and Watson said: “Over millions of years, Earth’s rotation has slowed down due to frictional effects related to the tides driven by the moon.
“That process adds about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century.
“A few billion years ago, an Earth day lasted only about 19 hours.”
However, in the past 20,000 years since the last ice age, melting polar ice sheets have reduced the surface pressure on Earth, steadily moving the mantle toward the poles.
The researchers wrote, “Just as a ballet dancer spins faster when they bring their arms toward their bodies — the axis around which they spin — so our planet’s rotational speed increases as this mantle mass moves closer to Earth’s axis.
“And this process shortens every day by about 0.6 milliseconds per century.”
Once scientists took into account small fluctuations in rotational speed that we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects, they were baffled by the findings.
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They found that despite breaking a record for the shortest day, “the long-term trajectory appears to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020,” marking an “unprecedented shift” in the past five decades.
Researchers have come up with a number of different theories as to why this happens, with some suggesting that weather events such as melting ice sheets or back-to-back la Nina may have played a role.
Some even hypothesized it could be related to the massive volcanic explosion in Tonga that injected massive amounts of water into the atmosphere, but that seems unlikely given the eruption happened in January this year.
Professors King and Watson added: “Scientists have speculated that this recent, mysterious change in the planet’s rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the ‘Chandler wobble’ – a small deviation in the Earth’s rotational axis with a period of about 430 days.
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“Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobbling has decreased in recent years; the two can be linked.”
While the Earth seems to suddenly slow down, it is also moving further away from the sun.
According to NASA, the Earth is on average about 150 million kilometers away from the giant fiery flame ball, which revolves in an elliptical orbit.
However, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun has slowly increased over time, mainly because the Sun is losing mass.
Nuclear fusion, which converts mass into energy, is the power of the sun.
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