Climate change is making days longer, as the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets causes water to move closer to the equator, fattening the planet and slowing its rotation, according to a recent study.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used both observations and reconstructions to track variations of mass at Earth’s surface since 1900.
In the 20th century, researchers found that between 0.3 milliseconds per century and 1 millisecond per century were added to the length of a day by climate-induced increases. Since 2000, they found that number accelerated to 1.3 milliseconds per century.
“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years, whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years. And that is striking.”
Researchers said that, under high greenhouse gas emission scenarios, the climate-induced increase in the length of a day will continue to grow and could reach a rate twice as large as the present one. This could have implications for a number of technologies humans rely on, like navigation.
“All the data centers that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing,” Soja said. “We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft.”