Climate Change Is Making Earth Spin Faster, May Skip One Second On World Clock In 2029

Climate change is set to mess up how we measure time, as our planet is spinning faster, a new study has said.

According to scientists, climate change is affecting Earth's rotation and delaying the need for history's first "negative leap second" by three years, a study published last week suggested.

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Negative leap second??

For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to.?

Clocks may have to skip a second — called a “negative leap second” — around 2029, according to a study in the journal Nature.

“This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal,” said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.?

Unusual times

“It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

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Why earth is spinning faster

Ice melting at both of Earth’s poles has been counteracting the planet's burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.

“We are headed toward a negative leap second," said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn’t part of the study. "It’s a matter of when.”

It’s a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time.

What happens in a minute with only 59 seconds

Experts fear that introducing a negative leap second -- a minute with only 59 seconds -- into standard time could cause havoc on computer systems across the world.

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For most of history, time was measured by the rotation of the Earth. However in 1967, the world's timekeepers embraced atomic clocks -- which use the frequency of atoms as their tick-tock -- ushering in a more precise era of timekeeping.

But sailors, who still relied on the Sun and stars for navigation, and others wanted to retain the connection between Earth's rotation and time.

How time is measured?

There was a problem. Our planet is an unreliable clock, and had long been rotating slightly slower than atomic time, meaning the two measurements were out of sync.

So a compromise was struck. Whenever the difference between the two measurements approached 0.9 of a second, a "leap second" was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the internationally agreed standard by which the world sets its clocks.

Though most people likely have not noticed, 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC since 1972, the last coming in 2016.

But in recent years a new problem has emerged that few saw coming: Earth's rotation has been speeding up, overtaking atomic time.

This means that to bring the two measurements in sync, timekeepers may have to introduce the first ever negative leap second.

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