Climate change is impacting everything from food production to natural disasters, and it is also impacting the rate at which our planet spins.
According to a new study, published Wednesday in Nature, the Earth’s rotation is slowing due to melting polar ice, which is a result of climate change. The slowed spin means that our days are actually getting slightly longer.
Agnew said the planet has been spinning faster for about 50 years now. It becomes less pronounced when the polar ice caps begin to melt rapidly. While we know that climate change affects so many things, scientists did not believe, until now, that humans could control the rate at which the Earth spins. That was thought to be the work of tides and other natural forces.
We are losing a “leap second” for the first time ever, and a micro change like a small fraction in a seconds leads to a change in the length of the day, even a year, so that we will need to make adjustments. It is a natural fact with its own El Niño that the length of a day fluctuates by years, due to air currents, ocean currents, etc. But it is happening to a slightly higher extent nowadays because of the loss of ice from the polar ice sheet.
So how does the loss of ice impact the length of the day? Similarly to a skater spinning on the ice. When the skater opens their arms, they slow down, and when they bring in their arms back, they speed up. This deals with how they are changing the moments of inertia, which is related to the conservation of angular momentum. Same as the Earth, it is spinning around the polar axis. When the ice at the north and south poles disappears, it flows into lower latitudes towards the equator, so that it is redistributing that mass from the axis of rotation.
However, people do not need to worry much about it, it is just a change in a small fraction of a second which will not really influence our daily lives but it does speak into the profound impact of climate change on the entire planetary system.
In conclusion, climate change indeed influences our life in various aspects no matter how big the influence is. More and more people should get to know the influences and attach importance to protecting the environment in order to achieve sustainability.
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