Scientists don't know why the Earth is spinning faster than usual, which is making the days shorter than usual.
The UK's National Physical Laboratory has taken new measurements that show the Earth is spinning faster than it did 50 years ago.
The Earth's full rotation took 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours on June 29. This was the shortest day ever measured.
Scientists have warned that we might need to take a second off our atomic clocks if the rate of rotation keeps getting faster.
“If Earth’s fast rotation continues, it could lead to the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second,” astrophysicist Graham Jones reported via TimeandDate.com.
“This would be required to keep civil time — which is based on the super-steady beat of atomic clocks — in step with solar time, which is based on the movement of the sun across the sky.
“A negative leap second would mean that our clocks skip one second, which could potentially create problems for IT systems.”
Researchers at Meta said a leap second would have colossal effects on technology and become a “major source of pain” for hardware infrastructures.
“The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers,” a blog post on the topic, authored by researchers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi, claimed.
“In any case, every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures.”
Scientists Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard, and Nikolay Sidorenkov say that the irregular rotations are caused by something called the Chandler Wobble, which is an irregular movement of the Earth's geographical poles across the surface of the globe.
Zotov told TimeandDate that the Chandler wobble usually has an amplitude of 3m to 4m at the surface of the Earth, but that it went away from 2017 to 2020.
Some experts think that the melting and refreezing of ice caps on the highest mountains in the world could be causing the speed to change.
TimeandDate said, "Earth has had its shortest day since scientists started using atomic clocks to measure how fast it spins."
“On June 29, 2022, Earth completed one spin in 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours. This is the latest in a series of speed records for Earth since 2020.”
Zotov told TimeandDate that there is a "70% chance" that the planet has already reached the minimum length of a day. This means that we probably won't ever have to use a "negative leap second."
But Zoltov said that there is no way to know for sure with the technology we have now.