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Human-driven melting of polar ice sheets is lengthening Earth’s day by 1.33 milliseconds per century, the fastest slowdown in rotation in 3.6 million years, researchers found.
- On Tuesday, researchers from the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth that Earth’s day is lengthening at about 1.33 milliseconds per century, an unprecedented slowdown in at least 3.6 million years.
- Human-Driven warming is melting polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers, moving water into oceans and redistributing Earth’s mass farther from its spin axis, which slows rotation via conservation of angular momentum.
- By analysing fossil shells, researchers reconstructed sea-level changes from foraminifera and developed a Physics-Informed Diffusion Model to integrate paleoclimate data with physics constraints.
- Tiny shifts in Earth’s spin risk disrupting GPS satellites, space missions, financial networks and telecommunications, though the general public is unlikely to notice millisecond-scale changes.
- The study suggests that on longer timescales, only one earlier period around 2 million years ago had comparable rates, while by the end of the 21st century, climate-driven mass redistribution could exceed the Moon’s influence on day length.
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