Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks

The melting of polar ice due to global warming is affecting Earth’s rotation and could have an impact on precision timekeeping, according tospeed up so rapidly that everyone gets flung into space.

Technologists, however, demand excruciating levels of exactitude. Atomic clocks and not sundials now tell us what time it is. In atomic time, a second is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a Cesium atom. The goal of the people who want to get things exactly right is to make sure that atomic time is perfectlyFor example, GPS satellites need to know exactly where Earth is beneath them — and precisely what time it is — to accurately get you from your house to the nearest Arby’s.

Here is where the casual reader’s head might start spinning. The melting of the ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland shifts mass — meltwater — toward the equator. That process increases the equatorial bulge of the planet. Meanwhile, at the poles, the land that had been pressed down by ice rises, and Earth becomes more spherical.

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