This month, the globe almost broke the record once more, as it recorded on July 26 a revolution around itself in less than 24 hours by 1.50 milliseconds.
The Earth’s speed has been increasing recently, as in 2020, it experienced the shortest month ever measured, since the 1960s.
That year, she set the previous record for the shortest day of 1.47 milliseconds in less than 24 hours.
In 2021, the Earth continued to rotate at an increasing rate, despite not breaking new records, according to the “Monte Carlo International Radio” website.
But when we observe this in the long term, it appears that the Earth’s rotation is slowing down. In every century, the Earth takes a few milliseconds more to complete one revolution.
Scientists do not know the causes of this phenomenon conclusively, but they are likely to be due to processes in the inner or outer layers of the planet’s interior, oceans, tides, or even changes in climate.
If the Earth continues to rotate at an increasing rate, this might lead to the introduction of a negative leap second, in order to keep the rate at which the Earth orbits the sun consistent with the measurement of atomic hours.
However, the negative second is likely to create problems for IT systems, Meta recently published a blog post stating that adding the leap second is a “risky” move that does more harm than good.
She attributed this to the fact that the clock would then jump from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before counting back to 00:00:00. Such time will lead to software crashes or data corruption due to timestamps on data storage.
It is noteworthy that the Coordinated Universal Time, the basic time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time, has been updated by leap second 27 times so far, the last of which was in 2016.
The earth day is the time it takes for the earth to rotate around itself in full, but the forces of attraction between the earth and the moon play a role.
The length of the day on the planet, known as 24 hours, is not fixed, but increases at a very small rate, by 1.8 milliseconds per century, as a result of a very weak slowdown in the speed of the Earth’s rotation around itself.
A “millisecond” is a thousandth of a second, and according to this rate, an Earth day takes regarding 3.3 million years to increase by one minute. The Earth’s rotation around itself becomes slower when the Moon moves away from it, as the Moon moves away from the Earth at a rate of 3.8 centimeters each year.
