The melting of polar ice caps caused by global warming has changed the rate at which the Earth spins, concluded a study published Wednesday in Nature, and, within the next couple of years, that will cause the world to lose one second of time.
The Earth’s rate of rotation can be affected both by what’s going happening on the planet’s surface and in its molten core. It’s also be impacted by earthquakes, gravitational drag from the sun and moon, and friction between the ocean’s waters and the seafloor.
The world’s timekeeping runs on an internationally agree-upon universal time, UTC, set by atomic clocks. It’s been adjusted before—27 times, in fact, since 1972 when international timekeepers agreed to adding “leap seconds.” Although nearly imperceptible to humans, the changing of the world’s clock by a leap second can have a significant impact on computing systems.
In 2022, an international group of measurement scientists, or metrologists, voted to eliminate leap seconds and instead possibly add a larger amount of time, such as a minute, less regularly. However, the details won’t be determine until the consortium meets again in 2026.
