According to scientists, the earth must have been faster than 2020 last year, as the planet spun faster last year than in decades.
Graham Jones and Konstantin Bikos write together via TimeandDate.com that the earth is typically an efficient timer and that “it rotates every 86,400 seconds, which equates to 24 hours, or one average Sunday.” However, that changed slightly last year. Although the co-authors acknowledge that the rotation of the earth equal to 24 hours is not always perfect.
“When very accurate atomic clocks were developed in the 1960s, they showed that the length of an average sun can vary by milliseconds (1 millisecond is 0.001 seconds),” Jones and Bikos wrote. “These differences are obtained by measuring the rotation of the earth with respect to distant astronomical objects, and using a mathematical formula to calculate the average Sunday.”
The earth’s 28 fastest days, since 1960, all took place in 2020. While last year felt so endless for so many people since the world closed last March due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2020, according to TimeandDate, actually had the shortest days on record. .com.
Before this year began, the shortest day since 1973 was July 5, 2005, when the Earth’s rotation took 1.0516 milliseconds less than 86,400 seconds.
But by mid-2020, the Earth had beaten that record no less than 28 times. The shortest day of all came on July 19, when the earth completed its turn in 1.4602 milliseconds in less than 86,400 seconds.
The Earth’s rotation can shift due to the movement of the planet’s core as well as changing patterns of the weather / atmosphere, oceans and other effects, reports TimeandDate.com.
The report further states that if the earth becomes too unbased with the atomic clocks, that a “positive or negative leap second can be used to bring them back in line.” Jumping seconds were fixed in 1972 and the rotation of the earth is sometimes slow. There were 27 leap seconds between 2016 and 2016, all positive which added an extra second to our watches and made the earth catch up.
Now the earth is moving faster, and scientists say if it continues, negative flicker seconds may be needed and our clocks will skip a second to keep up with the planet.
Peter Whibberley, a physicist at the National Physics Laboratory in the United Kingdom, expanded this sentiment via The Telegraph.
“It is quite possible that a negative leap second will be needed if the rotation of the earth rises further, but it is too early to say whether this is likely to happen,” Whibberley told The Telegraph. “There are also international discussions about the future of leap seconds, and it is also possible that the need for a negative leap second could push the decision to an end of leap seconds forever.”