Melting ice is impacting timekeeping and might break our computers

Climate change has done a lot to alter our world but did you know that global warming is affecting the planet’s rotation? It may not sound like a big deal but this could impact how we measure time according to a new study. 

Published in the journal Nature, the new study found that the world’s melting polar ice, a trend primarily driven by climate change, has caused the planet to spin less faster than it used to when polar ice was more abundant. 

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Study author Duncan Agnew is a Geophysicist at the University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography and he explained that the reason behind what was happening was the change in Earth’s mass. 

However, it's a little more complicated since the melting ice doesn’t change the mass of the Earth but rather its concentration, which in turn affects the planet’s angular velocity according to a breakdown from NBC News. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By ESO, A.Santerne,  CC BY 4.0

Agnew likened the effect of what was happening on Earth to a figure skater twirling on the ice, explaining that if a skater was spinning, but if they stretched out their arms and legs while twirling, it would slow them down. 

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

On the contrary, if the figure skater kept their arms and legs close to their body, it would help them spin faster. The Earth works a lot like the figure skater when polar ice melts since less ice at the poles means more at the equator. 

You can think of the ice caps on the planet’s poles as a figure skater drawing their arms and legs in. But once that ice melts, it makes its way closer to the equator and that acts like a figure skater stretching out their arms and legs. 

“What you’re doing with the ice melt is you’re taking water that’s frozen solid in places like Antarctica and Greenland, and that frozen water is melting, and you move the fluids to other places on the planet,” explained Thomas Herring.

“The water flows off towards the equator.” Herring, who is a geophysics professor at the ​​Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was not involved with the study, explained to NBC News about how the Earth’s melting polar ice caps. 

The reasons behind why the planet’s rotation change can affect timekeeping aren’t easy to understand but it essentially boils down to slowing speeds affecting the length of a day in almost imperceptible amounts according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By by Przemyslaw, CC BY-SA 2.0

Today the planet’s rotation is 0.0025 seconds shorter than it was fifty years ago. It might not sound like much but it's more than enough to cause a serious headache. Most of our timekeeping is digital in the modern world. 

Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash

There are timekeeping management tools known as leap seconds that help manage the accurate time of the planet. Sometimes an extra ‘leap second’ is added to the end of a minute while other times a second is taken away. 

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Agnew’s research suggests that at some point in the next ten years, timekeepers are going to need to adjust their world's time by one negative second. This is something that has never happened before and why it could be a problem. 

Computer time code was designed to handle leap seconds but since we have never had to incorporate a negative leap second into our timekeeping, it may pose a serious issue. It might not even be possible to do according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

"Even a few years ago the expectation was that leap seconds would always be positive, and happen more and more often… But if you look at changes in the Earth's rotation, it looks like a negative one is quite likely,” Agnew said. 

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“One second doesn't sound like much, but in today's interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems,” Agnew added. It’s an interesting and novel problem but maybe we need to prepare for a Y2K-style computer failure!