The impacts of human-caused climate change are so overwhelming they're actually messing with time, according to new research.The impacts of human-caused climate change are so overwhelming they're actually messing with time, according to new research.
The number of hours, minutes and seconds making up each day on Earth are dictated by the speed of the Earth's rotation, which is influenced by a complex knot of factors. These include processes in the planet's fluid core, the ongoing impact of the melting of huge glaciers after the last ice age, as well as melting polar ice due to climate change.
But that could be changing. If the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, "climate change could become the new dominant factor," outpacing the moon's role, he told CNN. If planet-heating pollution continues to rise, warming the oceans and accelerating ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the rate of change is set to soar, the report found. If the world is unable to rein in emissions, climate change could increase the length of a day by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century - overtaking the natural impacts of the moon.
From the late 1960s, the world started using coordinated universal time to set time zones. UTC relies on atomic clocks but still keeps pace with the planet's rotation. That means at some point "leap seconds" need to be added or subtracted to keep alignment with the Earth's rotation.