{"id":12155,"date":"2024-03-28T12:44:32","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T12:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/28\/climate-change-is-changing-how-we-keep-time\/"},"modified":"2024-03-28T12:44:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T12:44:32","slug":"climate-change-is-changing-how-we-keep-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/28\/climate-change-is-changing-how-we-keep-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change is changing how we keep time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Climate<\/div> \r\n

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Climate change may be making it harder to know exactly what time it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth\u2019s waistline. And that extra bulge is slowing the planet\u2019s rotation<\/a>, geophysicist Duncan Agnew reports online March 27 in Nature<\/em>. That climate change\u2013driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks, but that time is regularly adjusted to match Earth\u2019s actual spin. Earth\u2019s rotation isn\u2019t always smooth sailing \u2014 the speed of the planet\u2019s spin changes depending on a variety of factors, including gravitational drag from the sun and the moon, changes to the rotation speed of Earth\u2019s core, friction between ocean waters and the seafloor, and shifts in the planet\u2019s distribution of mass around its surface. Even earthquakes can affect the spin: The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Indonesia in 2004, for example, altered the land surface in such a way that it caused Earth to rotate a tiny bit faster, says Agnew, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.<\/p>\n\n\n