The ever-changing planet: Why is Earth suddenly slowing down?
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Loading... - Morowa Awuku
- 10 Aug 2022
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Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don't know why.
This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.
While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantly - even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.
It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.
The Ever-Changing Planet
Over millions of years, Earth's rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the Moon. That process adds about about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours. Read More...
