Climate change has been blamed for many dramatic effects on our planet and our lives. Now it may even affect the measurement of time.
You’ve probably heard of “leap seconds” — the sliver of time scientists occasionally add to the world’s official time standard to resolve a divergence between old-fashioned time-telling and modern atomic clocks.
But we’re nearing a year when a negative leap second could be needed to shave time — an unprecedented step that will depend in part on how climate change affects the Earth’s rotation, according to a new study.
Here’s an overview of the unusual situation, which is laid out by geophysicist Duncan Agnew, in a study published Wednesday in Nature.
Why is one second such a big deal?
In our technologically interconnected era, many devices and systems rely on sharing a certain awareness of precisely what time it is. While leap seconds have largely been absorbed into current mechanisms, experts say, a negative leap second — or, a minute with only 59 seconds — could pose an entirely new challenge.
“Even a few years ago, the expectation was that leap seconds would always be positive, and happen more and more often,” Agnew said on the website of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.
But because of new dynamics affecting how fast the Earth rotates, he added, a negative leap second now seems just years away.
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