Study: ‘Climate change is messing with how we measure time’ – ‘Affecting Earth’s rotation…& how we keep track of time’
By Marc Morano
March 28, 2024
7:36 am
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-climate-messing.htmlby Daniel Lawler and Juliette Collen
Struggle to wrap your head around daylight savings? Spare a thought for the world’s timekeepers, who are trying to work out how climate change is affecting Earth’s rotation—and in turn, how we keep track of time.
In a strange twist, global warming could even help out timekeepers by delaying the need for history’s first “negative leap second” by three years, a study published on Wednesday suggested.
Experts fear that introducing a negative leap second—a minute with only 59 seconds—into standard time could cause havoc on computer systems across the world.
For most of history, time was measured by the rotation of the Earth. However in 1967, the world’s timekeepers embraced atomic clocks—which use the frequency of atoms as their tick-tock—ushering in a more precise era of timekeeping.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/03/28/study-climate-change-is-messing-with-how-we-measure-time-affecting-earths-rotation-how-we-keep-track-of-time/
