. In the coming years, a second will need to be removed from global time. That “drop second” will be a first for international timekeepers, but according to new research, it will be delayed by climate change.
The last time the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service added a leap second was at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds UTC on December 31, 2016.this week claims that the increased melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica is redistributing mass, acting as a drag factor on Earth’s rotation. Changes in the Earth’s molten core also contribute to variations in the rate Earth spins.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level, enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” said the paper’s author, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, to