Warning: Earth rotates more slowly as polar ice melts

Researchers predict that in the next few years, every person in this world will lose 1 second of their daily time .

That is exactly what will happen when the polar ice melt accelerates due to climate change , making the Earth's rotation speed faster and changing the Earth's axis.

The Earth completing its rotation faster threatens to disrupt human time. (Photo: Getty Images).

The hours and minutes that determine the length of our day are determined by the Earth's rotation. But that rotation is not fixed, it can change more or less depending on what is happening on the surface and in the Earth's molten core.

Until now, people have not noticed the change in time when the Earth rotates faster or slower because scientists have devised a method to synchronize the time the Earth completes one rotation with the other. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) - an international standard for atomic date and time. That method adjusts the hour according to 'leap seconds'. If the Earth rotates slower than standard time, scientists adjust UTC time by one positive leap second, adding one second to the time of the day. From the 1970s until now, 27 leap seconds have been added.

However, after a period of slow rotation, Earth's rotation is now accelerating due to changes in its surface . For the first time, scientists will have to subtract a second instead of adding it like before.

Patrizia Tavella, a member of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, wrote in an article accompanying the study: 'A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so are the problems it could create. is unprecedented'.

According to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), adding or subtracting leap seconds has pros and cons. They help ensure astronomical observations are synchronized with the time on a clock, but leap seconds can also cause trouble for some applications and telecommunications software that operate in seconds.

In July 2022, a series of technology giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon launched a campaign to eliminate the addition of leap seconds to UTC to align with the Earth's rotation. Instead of the clock showing 23:59:59 (23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds) switching to 0:0:0 at midnight, the clock read 23:59:60. That creates difficulties for computers, which rely on a network of time-keeping servers to schedule events and to record sequences of activity. In 2012, after one second was added to UTC, a series of sites such as Mozilla, Reddit, LinkedIn. all reported network outages.