The Earth had its shortest day in recorded history on June 29 after completing a full rotation 1.59 milliseconds faster than its regular 24-hour rotation, breaking its record.
Driving the news: The faster spin comes as the result of a slight “wobble” in the Earth’s axis, per Fox News.
- According to Business Insider, wobbles in Earth’s axis aren’t uncommon and can actually be “a remarkably good record of changes in land water storage,” NASA reported.
What they’re saying: The Earth has slowly been increasing its speed over the last few years. According to The Independent, our planet saw its shortest month since the 1960s on July 19, 2020, at 1.47 milliseconds under 24 hours.
- Earth’s faster speeds may result in the introduction of a negative leap second “... in order to keep the rate that the Earth orbits the sun consistent with the measurement from atomic clocks,” The Independent reported.
- Negative leap seconds may have negative consequences. According to Time and Date, “A negative leap second would mean that our clocks skip one second, which could potentially create problems for IT systems.”
- “Meta recently published a blog that stated the leap second ‘mainly benefits scientists and astronomers’ but that it is a ‘risky practice that does more harm than good,’” The Independent reported.
- According to Australian news site 7 News, “In 2012, Reddit was inaccessible for up to 40 minutes after an outage caused by a leap second which confused the system’s timer.”
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Details: Some scientists attribute the shorter days to the Chandler wobble, which is “the name given to a small, irregular movement of Earth’s geographical poles across the surface of the globe,” per Time and Date.