The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth’s waistline. And that extra bulge is. That climate change–driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards.
The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks, but that time is regularly adjusted to match Earth’s actual spin. Earth’s rotation isn’t always smooth sailing — the speed of the planet’s spin changes depending on a variety of factors, including gravitational drag from the sun and the moon, changes to the rotation speed of Earth’s core, friction between ocean waters and the seafloor, and shifts in the planet’s distribution of mass around its surface.
But the impact of that quake is much smaller than that of the ice sheets’ melting — a point that Agnew says he finds particularly startling. Humankind “has done something that affects, measurably, the rotation rate of the entire Earth.”,” an extra tick that international timekeepers agreed to add to UTC as needed . That slowdown will ultimately mean that timekeepers, under the current system, must begin removing leap seconds from the UTC, rather than inserting them, to keep things in sync.
That shift in strategy might have begun as soon as in 2026. But the study suggests that, thanks to climate change, global timekeepers now have an extra two or three years before they need to adjust, notes geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard University. But no realistic projections of future melting can forestall the inevitable beyond 2030, Mitrovica adds: One way or another, the world is going to have to start losing time — or international timekeeping guidelines will need to change.
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