The news is that the planet has just beaten its own records and recently had the shortest day of its daily rotations, with 1.59 milliseconds less.
The Earth’s rotation is the movement that allows the alternation between light and shadow, which is nothing more than the day and night that we know. Many of us believe that this movement occurs in exactly 24 hours, but the truth is that the Earth’s rotation undergoes some variations in its rotations, eventually causing shorter days.
The shortest day on Earth
The variations in the rotation of the Earth are given by several factors that can be related to the processes that occur in the Earth’s core, to the tides of the oceans or even to changes in the climate. However, it happens from time to time that these processes cause a significant variation in the length of days, as happened on June 29, 2022, when the Earth spun faster and had a rotation of -1.59 milliseconds of standard time. take to complete a lap around yourself?
But the acceleration in the movement of the Earth’s rotation did not stop there, on July 26 it broke its records again, registering -1.50 milliseconds. This was the shortest day in Earth’s history since atomic clocks were first used for measuring time.
The following graph shows how the length of days has been fluctuating in recent years, which since 2019 has been falling more and more. Data is provided by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS).
The ‘Waky Chandler’
For now, it is not known exactly what is causing the change in the length of days that descends further and further into negative numbers, however scientists have a few theories. While it’s true that ocean tides, the Earth’s core, and even some weather events could be causing the day length to decrease, the researchers believe this could be more related to the Chandler Wobble.
The Chandler wobble is one of the many motions that the Earth presents that not only moves rotationally and translationally, but in this process other motions such as the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Chandler wobble are generated. The latter would be something like the oscillation that can be seen in tops when they spin on their own axis, which seem to dance on themselves as they spin.
What happens if the Earth’s rotation speed changes?
In a matter of hours of light, milliseconds will not have much of an impact on the changes in life on the planet, but they would have a big impact on technology. Atomic clocks are the most accurate that human technology uses to establish its GPS systems, however, they do not take into account the change in the Earth’s rotation, so a simple mismatch would make devices that use measurement systems obsolete. obligations.
Computers, smartphones and communication systems are synchronized with Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, which it defines as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970. A progressive and constant change in the length of the day, this would cause these technologies to collapse and new standards would have to be defined to correct device synchronization.