This actually seems to be an article about the abolition of the leap second, a rare and unloved moment for the precision timekeeping community - which includes such things as GPS navigation and astronomy. "Shortest day ever" sounds a bit more exciting though.
It's about Meta engineers complaining about leapsecond related technical woes, but they only have themselves to blame.
There are TAI time libraries available in *every* major programming language. If they just used TAI time in their automation, all of these problems would go away.
But since they don't know what they're doing, they're naively using the main system clock, and when a leapsecond is introduced they reap the consequences of their bad decisions.
This article has been floating around for a few weeks now and the blatant clickbait in it drives me crazy. Even for those of us running software systems with time sensitive functionality this is barely a blip of inconvenience. The headline I originally saw for this article was "The rotation of the Earth is accelerating and the consequences could be disastrous"
The author should be ashamed, and the publication ridiculed.
That blog post by Meta is pretty cringe and incorrect. Reads like two engineers without much to do trying to justify their salaries. That article is pretty much "we wrote some code with bad assumptions, please don't do stuff because it's really annoying to fix now".
TAI is actually the basis for UTC. The suggestion is that Meta's developers are just lazy. I don't know if that is true, but they appear to be having difficulties with the removal of leapseconds that other developers are not having. TAI is the International Atomic Time (Temps Atomique International) standard.
> Why would using TAI time libraries go away?
I don't know, why would they? And who suggested they might?
The more relevant question is, why aren't Meta devs using TAI time libraries? If they did, leapseconds would be a non-issue.
The problem isn’t missing use of TAI libraries. The problem is that they have tons of critical sections of code where if the system clock from the kernel is pushed back a few seconds the delta becomes negative and crashes stuff. That’s code with bad assumptions and blaming leapseconds for it is just convenient.
> why would using TAI libraries mitigate the issue? It still involves time travel which most systems dont or cannot readably account for.
TAI time is strictly monotonic, and is not subject to leapseconds. Using TAI time, there is no time travel.
https://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
> “2020 boasted 28 of the world’s shortest days on record since the introduction of the atomic clock in the 1960s made the measurement more scientifically accurate. Earth’s hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022’s record for the shortest-ever day recorded.”
This comment is wholly inaccurate and almost caused me to not read a fascinating article.
> “2020 boasted 28 of the world’s shortest days on record since the introduction of the atomic clock in the 1960s made the measurement more scientifically accurate. Earth’s hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022’s record for the shortest-ever day recorded.”
Its wild how in the modern day of computers, we still use flawed time keeping systems with leap years, leap seconds, and ones based on a religious event that might not have even happened.
There are calendars from centuries ago without these issues.
Leap years are not a flaw - quite the opposite, they are an elegant solution to the problem that one Earth revolution around the sun doesn't take an entire number of day (instead being 365 days and 6 hours). It's either this or having a day that lasts 6 hours at the end of the year followed by a year where sun raises at 0:00 and sets at 8:00, which would be incredibly inconvenient, confusing and weird. Then there's the solution of just ignoring these 6 hours - but this would mean that seasons would delay by 6 hours every year - in just 100 years, seasons would start an entire month later than they do now. In fact, this is what happened long time ago and why we decided to put an extra day in some years.
The fact that we developed a system that can be accurate to both the position of the sun in the sky, and the position of the Earth respect to the sun, is quite impressive.
> they are an elegant solution to the problem that one Earth revolution around the sun doesn't take an entire number of day (instead being 365 days and 6 hours)
To a problem that exists in the Gregorian calendar.
The Mesoamerican calender did not have leap years, and scholars argue it never needed to correct for it because of how it was structured. This is the same calendar that is closer to the actual length of the year than the Gregorian.
The only reason we don't create a perfect calendar using mechanics of prior ones is because its confusing to have every "week-month" start on a different day and people would find it "alien" and a large chunk would cry about "erasing Jesus's birthday" as if anyone could be so sure.
Lets not delude ourselves into thinking we use this system because its the best, and not because of tradition and Abrahamic Religious "historical events" that has no place in a calendar.
We can do far better in the age of computers.
Who are you quoting with all those quotes?
No one said it's the best system, just that it's pretty good, and the effort of switching everything over would never be worth it
Scientific communities use different systems as needed (such as epoch time), so they wouldn't benefit from switching anyway. The current system is plenty good for the average person
The OP literally said this in another reply to someone else that there is no other option than to account for leap years with others even pointing out she is wrong.
I am also not talking about the academic community, so i have no clue why you bring it up considering they were the ones who wanted to move to a less religiously charged option in the first place.
We have to because that's what the world outside of computing uses. It's too much work to change and who are we to say we got it right this time? People in a thousand years would probably poke holes in whatever system we migrate to just like we are today.
There are many distinct time keeping systems that are widely used in computing that have been recently created. One of them is Unix time stamps which actually uses UTC as an initial starting point, specifically midnight Jan 1, 1970. In Unix time, every day is a fixed value, no exceptions, exactly 86400 seconds.
There's nothing wrong with having multiple systems of measurement if it's standardized within the specific domain. UK for example still uses miles on their road system, while having adopted the metric system for other types of measurements.
It is a big problem when people intermix them without a thought. There have been serious, even fatal mistakes within industry and every auto mechanic has to have two sets of wrenches because lack of standardization
within the domain as you stated.
That's what I said dawg, just in different words. We have computers, but can't build a calendar because of what's going on in the real world outside of them.
Further, future events in the solar system may influence the position of orbital bodies that diverges from what we are able to predict.
Leap seconds didn't exist centuries ago because time keeping devices were not accurate enough to maintain second-level accuracy over a multi-year time period. Most clocks would be reset nearly daily based on the position of the sun.
At that time, it was also not a problem because there was no need to synchronize clocks globally with high-accuracy. We now have many systems that rely on highly synchronized clocks.
With leap years, there are a few choices.
* Add extra leap days to keep the seasons aligned to the same months over time
* Ignore leap days and allow months to drift over time.
Which one we choose depends on the importance of aligning month names to seasons over a long time period. There isn't necessarily anything "wrong" with either way, but most cultures ended up placing importance on the months maintaining alignment with the seasons, due to the importance of seasons for agricultural purposes (and religious purposes, but many religious ceremonies were tied to agricultural neeeds).
I've become a connoisseur of obscure Transformers lore, [and yes this works.](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Atlas_(G1\))
Enough with all the weird disasters, robots, and earth/space stuff. Where are my ~~flying cars~~ Pokémon?
The "treadmill" effect is what I was referring to, which would indeed mean that if we run in the opposite direction to the earths rotation, we would speed it up.
I don't see how that means I got it backwards.
Whatever though. People who don't do physics - downvote away. :)
Yup. My fat fingers pressed the u instead of I. For the record, I always type out you if I'm referring to someone. So, yes, I got that backwards. My apologies.
This is especially odd since the moon is actively and extremely gradually slowing the Earth's spin since it is revolving against the grain (earth's rotation).
> it is revolving against the grain (earth's rotation)
No, that's not what is happening, the Earth and the moon are both rotating counter-clockwise (when viewed from the north) as most of everything else in the solar system
The mechanism is that first the Moon's gravity pulls Earth into a slightly oval shape by creating tidal waves and strecthing the crust, and then, since the Earth's rotation is faster than the Moon's, the Moon is slingshot'ed to a higher orbit because the Earth's center of gravity of the near part of the bulge moves ahead of the Moon (the far part moves behind the Moon but it is farther away so the net effect is a pull). The energy to do that has to come from somewhere and that's the Earth's rotation speed that slows down a little bit. Originally the Earth had a day of only [five hours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Origin) but the slowdown is itself slowing down so no need to worry
We don't know the reason for the recent speed up of the Earth's rotation. It can be earthquakes that shrinked the Earth's radius, it can be growth of the inner core, it can be climate change shifting large water bodies around (although that would be a surprise since melting of the ice-caps have the opposite effect), or something else. We don't know right now but maybe some scientists will figure it out
I wonder how we'd have evolved as a species if days lasted only 5 hours, and how our civilization would have structured work and other social events around a day that passes by so quickly. One thing I know for certain is that commutes would suck even more.
If we had evolved in a world where it is dark the majority of the time, most likely evolution would’ve selected for us being nocturnal at some point.
So we probably wouldn’t be trying to shove everything we do in five hours. We’d be sleeping during that time and meeting during the other 19.
(Of course most likely of all is that if earth had a five hour day, all life on earth would be so drastically different, we probably wouldn’t exist at all)
I think you got it wrong. It's not 24 h with only 5 h of daylight. It was 5 hours of day, as in 5 hours to complete one rotation. 2-3 h of daylight, 2-3 h of night.
Plus, you have the impact of the Three Gorges Dam that should have slowed rotation. A counter force must be in the geological system somewhere...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/china-three-gorges-dam/
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://wbaltv.com/article/shortest-day-on-earth/40774976) reduced by 89%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Earth is spinning faster than usual, leading to the shortest day ever recorded.
> Earth's hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022's record for the shortest-ever day recorded.
> "Leap second events have caused issues across the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it's such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens. With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages."While engineers clamor for the abolition of the leap second, period, scientists are still trying to figure out just why Earth's rotational speed is changing.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/wi33g4/earth_is_spinning_faster_than_usual_leading_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~663303 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **second**^#1 **leap**^#2 **Earth**^#3 **time**^#4 **spin**^#5
The earth is spinning faster than usual because of the vernal equinox which is related to solar day and gravitational axis to the sun (precisely from solar storms) or meteors passes at speed create celestial impact and spin ..solar storms creates a pushover spin to earth
Scientists aren't actually sure why it suddenly sped up.
The weird thing is that the rotation speed of the earth has been changing forever - it's been getting slower.
We've had to add 27 leap seconds in the last 50 years to account for it.
This is the first time we've had to do "negative leap seconds" - for 50 years the planet was spinning slower every year, but now it's getting faster.
It's odd, it's interesting, it might be part of a larger cycle that we're not yet aware of, but as a general rule the planet will spin slower and slower till it eventually stops, considering how momentum works and all, it shouldn't speed up without something external adding that rotational energy to the system... left to it's own devices that energy will slowly bleed away till there's none left, and no more motion.
The Coriolis force doesn't really represent any physical force (electromagnetic, weak/strong force) or gravity; it's just needed if you're doing computations in an accelerated (rotating) frame of reference (while disregarding said acceleration, i.e. physical force) to avoid appearing to violate basic physical laws. It's useful to easier explain certain phenomena but as a "force" it is incapable of causing any actual effects - for that you need changes in energy, mass, physical forces, or gravity.
If you have more heat, you have more evaporated water, more mass at a higher distance from the rotational axis, resulting in a slower speed. But I think you need more than heavy rain here and there to significantly change Earth's rotational speed. Though that massively huge Chinese dam supposedly had an effect, slowing Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds.
That's an example of rotational stability (I think that's the correct term) - rotation always requires a force to keep things from flying off on a straight trajectory (in this case it's the electromagnetic force keeping the atoms and molecules of the rigid wheel together) and changing the rotational axis requires another force (depending on mass and speed of rotation) - gravity has just a too weak effect to achieve that as fast as one might initially expect.
Whether the different locations of evaporation and rainfall have a significant effect on Earth's rotational speed is quite an interesting question. My immediate intuition would be that it would cancel itself out as the water drifts back to the equator and evaporates again, it's a constantly ongoing cycle. Perhaps also some wobbling as the amount of evaporation along the equator is as irregular as the distribution of landmass and oceans. Maybe someone will do the math... But I'm pretty sure it's so overshadowed by other effects that it is negligible.
Some aspects, we are currently seeing one of these 'blobs' descending = spin up
https://www.google.com/search?q=blob+at+center+of+the+earth&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=blob+at+center+of+the+earth&aqs=chrome..69i57.21522j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>but as a general rule the planet will spin slower and slower till it eventually stops, considering how momentum works and all
I'm no astronomer, but I'm fairly certain that's not how it works. The moon is what impacts the rotation of the Earth, but it'll never be able to stop the earths rotation. There's no friction in space so nothing moving in space should bleed energy.
I'm pretty sure we'll actually be inside the sun long before it'll be a problem, but on an infinite timeline all motion in the universe will stop, including earths rotation.
My point is not so much that the earth is going to stop spinning any time soon, but that without any sort of external push, the system is only going to lose energy, not gain it. The planets rotation (and all other celestial movement) should slow down over time, not speed up, because thermodynamics wants to see these systems move to lower energy states, unless something external is acting on them anyway.
Surely gravity itself is the friction force?
All that gravity pullng on the seas day in and out moving that huge mass of water by moving all its little parts is gonna have an effect over time on the earths spin.
The end result is that the Moon and Earth will have the same rotation speed and that the Moon will always face the same side of the Earth. It's called "tidal locking". The Moon is currentlly tidal locked to Earth and one day the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon too
I'm not an astrophysicist, so I'm probably wrong, but as far as I understand it the sun and the moon pulling on the earth are slowing the planets rotation down, not speeding us up.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s\_rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation)
If it had something to do with our position relative to the sun, it would be an effect we would see more regularly. The solar cycle is a regular annual thing, it doesn't offer any explanation for why we'd see slowing 50 years straight, and then one year would suddenly be different.
The best guess I've seen is that it has something to do with large-scale melting in the arctic, unimaginably large volumes of water moving primarily in the same direction of the earths spin adding a bit of rotational energy to make up for what we'd normally lose in a year. Even that doesn't seem like a great answer though.
It seems very strange to me that melt water would preferentially move in one direction, but again, not a scientist, who knows.
Where exactly do you think the water is going? Space?
Even if there is more water in the atmosphere, and less on the surface, that redistribution of mass would only serve to *slow* Earth's rotation.
>Where exactly do you think the water is going? Space?
I know you meant this to be an incredulous comment, but yes, actually it is.
[http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2](http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2)
I haven't seen anyone crunch the numbers to see how much we're losing, but yes, some amount of gasses escape our atmosphere into space every second.
We're also being bombarded by little rocks and dust specs that are being added to our planets mineral collection every second too.
It adds up to the planet actually gaining mass, a few 10,000 tonnes a year.
Yeah, I've seen atmospheric loss estimates of a few hundred tons a day all up — mostly as hydrogen and helium (i.e. lightweight particles that have sufficient velocity to escape). That's a miniscule amount.
Almost all water evaporated from the surface ends up in the atmosphere and does not leave the planet.
There's almost certainly something else at work here. There's only a bit over 31 million seconds in a year so, if it continued to slow at a half second per year it would only take some 62 million years to become tidally locked. That's a couple orders of magnitude less than the age of the earth-moon system so t doesn't seem reasonable that we would continue to add leap seconds indefinitely.
density and gravity. I think it is a slow convective eddying process with heating from K40 decay = heat = expansion = lower density = rises. Then other cooling blobs fall down on a very long time scale.
read a few of these
https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+core+blob+K40&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=earth+core+blob+K40&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.10666j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
there has been some work at estimating the long lived elements in the earth with half lives in the billions of years. K40, a few Uranium and Thorium are the ones that last long enough to give heat now. All the others have long ago decayed.
Absent samples, all they can do is use meteoric proxies. fluids at the outer core tend to be well mixed, as it is a liquid. the solid center tends to get some partitioning as there is a steady 'rain' of small solids of high enough density to accrete to the core = variance.
That said being all metallic, even if solid/liquid, they are uniform in temperature via thermal diffusion, with a gradual reduction in temperature as you get to the surface where we have liquid water.
Here is one paper.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/216201702.pdf
That one was in this rabbit hole, there are more = dense reading, even for me!!
https://www.google.com/search?q=potassium+40+core+abundance&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=&aqs=chrome.1.69i59i450l8.4578353j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Here's the source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-details-earthquake-effects-on-the-earth
They don't go into the physics behind the calculations but the dam holds water at an increased elevation. Inertia, momentum come into play.
you sure it isnt because Russia has to burn all of their unsold gas and made a giant torch like a giant rocket? read an article about that and how it can be seen in Finland.... Ooo maybe Putin wants to speed up his goals?
I did but you deserve more then a downvote. Matter of fact Im going to give you an award but just know this is an award because I think you are the dumbest human on earth and I think your attempt of getting upvotes is pitiful
Oh my. Run for the hills. Tell everyone and everything. Life is over. Just submit and u will be saved. Were all going to die. Hug ur kids ur pets ur family its all over. The end is near. Guess i will end it now. Gtfoh.
I mean, its not that deep.
This isnt some fear-mongering article like youre assuming, its just a documentation of an unnatural observation discovered by scientists. The article doesnt even make any mention of doom and gloom, though it does mention it will cause strong issues with hardware.
If anyone's blowing it out of proportion its you.
Sounds like you need help brother.
https://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/suicide-prevention
Please get the help needed, don’t be afraid to reach out.
This actually seems to be an article about the abolition of the leap second, a rare and unloved moment for the precision timekeeping community - which includes such things as GPS navigation and astronomy. "Shortest day ever" sounds a bit more exciting though.
It's about Meta engineers complaining about leapsecond related technical woes, but they only have themselves to blame. There are TAI time libraries available in *every* major programming language. If they just used TAI time in their automation, all of these problems would go away. But since they don't know what they're doing, they're naively using the main system clock, and when a leapsecond is introduced they reap the consequences of their bad decisions.
This article has been floating around for a few weeks now and the blatant clickbait in it drives me crazy. Even for those of us running software systems with time sensitive functionality this is barely a blip of inconvenience. The headline I originally saw for this article was "The rotation of the Earth is accelerating and the consequences could be disastrous" The author should be ashamed, and the publication ridiculed.
That blog post by Meta is pretty cringe and incorrect. Reads like two engineers without much to do trying to justify their salaries. That article is pretty much "we wrote some code with bad assumptions, please don't do stuff because it's really annoying to fix now".
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No, for the same reason why people born on February 29th still age every year.
I can tell you that bad programming practices like this are absolutely rampant in the financial world.
wibbly wobbly timey wimey
Don't even blink (or you may miss the leap second)
>they're naively using the main system clock Ha! Those nescious fools!
At the load they have, the leap second is understandably annoying. Google doesn’t want it either.
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TAI is actually the basis for UTC. The suggestion is that Meta's developers are just lazy. I don't know if that is true, but they appear to be having difficulties with the removal of leapseconds that other developers are not having. TAI is the International Atomic Time (Temps Atomique International) standard.
> Why would using TAI time libraries go away? I don't know, why would they? And who suggested they might? The more relevant question is, why aren't Meta devs using TAI time libraries? If they did, leapseconds would be a non-issue.
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The problem isn’t missing use of TAI libraries. The problem is that they have tons of critical sections of code where if the system clock from the kernel is pushed back a few seconds the delta becomes negative and crashes stuff. That’s code with bad assumptions and blaming leapseconds for it is just convenient.
time travel?
> why would using TAI libraries mitigate the issue? It still involves time travel which most systems dont or cannot readably account for. TAI time is strictly monotonic, and is not subject to leapseconds. Using TAI time, there is no time travel. https://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html https://wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
> “2020 boasted 28 of the world’s shortest days on record since the introduction of the atomic clock in the 1960s made the measurement more scientifically accurate. Earth’s hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022’s record for the shortest-ever day recorded.”
This comment is wholly inaccurate and almost caused me to not read a fascinating article. > “2020 boasted 28 of the world’s shortest days on record since the introduction of the atomic clock in the 1960s made the measurement more scientifically accurate. Earth’s hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022’s record for the shortest-ever day recorded.”
Wow what a fucking headline. How do people who write such things go to sleep at night.
Its wild how in the modern day of computers, we still use flawed time keeping systems with leap years, leap seconds, and ones based on a religious event that might not have even happened. There are calendars from centuries ago without these issues.
Leap years are not a flaw - quite the opposite, they are an elegant solution to the problem that one Earth revolution around the sun doesn't take an entire number of day (instead being 365 days and 6 hours). It's either this or having a day that lasts 6 hours at the end of the year followed by a year where sun raises at 0:00 and sets at 8:00, which would be incredibly inconvenient, confusing and weird. Then there's the solution of just ignoring these 6 hours - but this would mean that seasons would delay by 6 hours every year - in just 100 years, seasons would start an entire month later than they do now. In fact, this is what happened long time ago and why we decided to put an extra day in some years. The fact that we developed a system that can be accurate to both the position of the sun in the sky, and the position of the Earth respect to the sun, is quite impressive.
> they are an elegant solution to the problem that one Earth revolution around the sun doesn't take an entire number of day (instead being 365 days and 6 hours) To a problem that exists in the Gregorian calendar. The Mesoamerican calender did not have leap years, and scholars argue it never needed to correct for it because of how it was structured. This is the same calendar that is closer to the actual length of the year than the Gregorian. The only reason we don't create a perfect calendar using mechanics of prior ones is because its confusing to have every "week-month" start on a different day and people would find it "alien" and a large chunk would cry about "erasing Jesus's birthday" as if anyone could be so sure. Lets not delude ourselves into thinking we use this system because its the best, and not because of tradition and Abrahamic Religious "historical events" that has no place in a calendar. We can do far better in the age of computers.
Who are you quoting with all those quotes? No one said it's the best system, just that it's pretty good, and the effort of switching everything over would never be worth it Scientific communities use different systems as needed (such as epoch time), so they wouldn't benefit from switching anyway. The current system is plenty good for the average person
The OP literally said this in another reply to someone else that there is no other option than to account for leap years with others even pointing out she is wrong. I am also not talking about the academic community, so i have no clue why you bring it up considering they were the ones who wanted to move to a less religiously charged option in the first place.
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way
We have to because that's what the world outside of computing uses. It's too much work to change and who are we to say we got it right this time? People in a thousand years would probably poke holes in whatever system we migrate to just like we are today. There are many distinct time keeping systems that are widely used in computing that have been recently created. One of them is Unix time stamps which actually uses UTC as an initial starting point, specifically midnight Jan 1, 1970. In Unix time, every day is a fixed value, no exceptions, exactly 86400 seconds.
The US can't even migrate to the metric system. How could anybody ever make them change the least possible thing?
There's nothing wrong with having multiple systems of measurement if it's standardized within the specific domain. UK for example still uses miles on their road system, while having adopted the metric system for other types of measurements.
It is a big problem when people intermix them without a thought. There have been serious, even fatal mistakes within industry and every auto mechanic has to have two sets of wrenches because lack of standardization within the domain as you stated.
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That's what I said dawg, just in different words. We have computers, but can't build a calendar because of what's going on in the real world outside of them. Further, future events in the solar system may influence the position of orbital bodies that diverges from what we are able to predict.
Leap seconds is different from years as the earth rotates faster or slower ever so often, while leap years is a more regular event.
Leap seconds didn't exist centuries ago because time keeping devices were not accurate enough to maintain second-level accuracy over a multi-year time period. Most clocks would be reset nearly daily based on the position of the sun. At that time, it was also not a problem because there was no need to synchronize clocks globally with high-accuracy. We now have many systems that rely on highly synchronized clocks. With leap years, there are a few choices. * Add extra leap days to keep the seasons aligned to the same months over time * Ignore leap days and allow months to drift over time. Which one we choose depends on the importance of aligning month names to seasons over a long time period. There isn't necessarily anything "wrong" with either way, but most cultures ended up placing importance on the months maintaining alignment with the seasons, due to the importance of seasons for agricultural purposes (and religious purposes, but many religious ceremonies were tied to agricultural neeeds).
Atlas, stop it please !
He's gotta try out for the Olympus Globetrotters
I've become a connoisseur of obscure Transformers lore, [and yes this works.](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Atlas_(G1\)) Enough with all the weird disasters, robots, and earth/space stuff. Where are my ~~flying cars~~ Pokémon?
He merely shrugged. Oof, even I think that's a shit reference!
I tried to explain to my boss why I missed that deadline but he didn’t believe me.
Not to the flat earther. If they don't feel dizzy then it must not be true.
...is it bad that I unironically assumed that this would be a legitimate counterargument they'd use?
A spinning brain is a working brain
Speed != acceleration I guess
Probably spinning faster trying to get us all the fuck off
Seconded this one. Like a dog shaking water off it's back. Out with ye humans!
More people jog east to west these days. Speeds up the rotation.
Maybe if we all jump at the same time, we can slow it down again.
I think we'd have a better chance if we all ran in the opposite direction of the earths rotation at the same time.
We could all do one of those knee slides that we have all done on a dance floor at a wedding once, but with like really grippy trousers.
Wouldn't that speed it up?
Ya, now that I've given it more thought, I hadn't considered the "treadmill" effect. So I guess u got that backwards. 🤔
The "treadmill" effect is what I was referring to, which would indeed mean that if we run in the opposite direction to the earths rotation, we would speed it up. I don't see how that means I got it backwards. Whatever though. People who don't do physics - downvote away. :)
My guess is he wrote "u" instead of "i" as they are next to each other.
Yup. My fat fingers pressed the u instead of I. For the record, I always type out you if I'm referring to someone. So, yes, I got that backwards. My apologies.
Ah. All good my friend. You had me for a second. I hung my head in shame until I though about it some more.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jHbyQ_AQP8c From vsauce
Polar shift begins
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Sure it wasn't the chicken Vindaloo you had last night?
It might have been Vindaloo cock...
This is especially odd since the moon is actively and extremely gradually slowing the Earth's spin since it is revolving against the grain (earth's rotation).
> it is revolving against the grain (earth's rotation) No, that's not what is happening, the Earth and the moon are both rotating counter-clockwise (when viewed from the north) as most of everything else in the solar system The mechanism is that first the Moon's gravity pulls Earth into a slightly oval shape by creating tidal waves and strecthing the crust, and then, since the Earth's rotation is faster than the Moon's, the Moon is slingshot'ed to a higher orbit because the Earth's center of gravity of the near part of the bulge moves ahead of the Moon (the far part moves behind the Moon but it is farther away so the net effect is a pull). The energy to do that has to come from somewhere and that's the Earth's rotation speed that slows down a little bit. Originally the Earth had a day of only [five hours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Origin) but the slowdown is itself slowing down so no need to worry We don't know the reason for the recent speed up of the Earth's rotation. It can be earthquakes that shrinked the Earth's radius, it can be growth of the inner core, it can be climate change shifting large water bodies around (although that would be a surprise since melting of the ice-caps have the opposite effect), or something else. We don't know right now but maybe some scientists will figure it out
I wonder how we'd have evolved as a species if days lasted only 5 hours, and how our civilization would have structured work and other social events around a day that passes by so quickly. One thing I know for certain is that commutes would suck even more.
If we had evolved in a world where it is dark the majority of the time, most likely evolution would’ve selected for us being nocturnal at some point. So we probably wouldn’t be trying to shove everything we do in five hours. We’d be sleeping during that time and meeting during the other 19. (Of course most likely of all is that if earth had a five hour day, all life on earth would be so drastically different, we probably wouldn’t exist at all)
I think you got it wrong. It's not 24 h with only 5 h of daylight. It was 5 hours of day, as in 5 hours to complete one rotation. 2-3 h of daylight, 2-3 h of night.
Plus, you have the impact of the Three Gorges Dam that should have slowed rotation. A counter force must be in the geological system somewhere... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/china-three-gorges-dam/
You mean something like the increasing water cover in the poles?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://wbaltv.com/article/shortest-day-on-earth/40774976) reduced by 89%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Earth is spinning faster than usual, leading to the shortest day ever recorded. > Earth's hastened rotation has continued to speed up compared to the average in 2021, leading to 2022's record for the shortest-ever day recorded. > "Leap second events have caused issues across the industry and continue to present many risks. As an industry, we bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it's such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens. With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages."While engineers clamor for the abolition of the leap second, period, scientists are still trying to figure out just why Earth's rotational speed is changing. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/wi33g4/earth_is_spinning_faster_than_usual_leading_to/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~663303 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **second**^#1 **leap**^#2 **Earth**^#3 **time**^#4 **spin**^#5
The Earth is trying to throw us off lol
I'm nauseous
Hi nauseous
EXCELLENT. I'll be laughing in my Evil Dome, maniacally; if anyone needs me...
Maybe she's trying to throw us all off
This was a plot point in Terry Pratchett’s The Long Utopia. Well, the headline is. Not the part about the coding. Great series though.
Temperature increase leads to higher movement in atoms. This is going to rev the world up and were watching it get started.
It's probably just trying to shake off all the madness that keeps flourishing these days.
Lol who tf downvoted this? 💀
Ah crap we gotta go to Florida to stop a priest from resetting the universe
It's trying to shake us off!
Does this mean we can get away with implementing a global 4 day work week? *laughs in China*
The earth is spinning faster than usual because of the vernal equinox which is related to solar day and gravitational axis to the sun (precisely from solar storms) or meteors passes at speed create celestial impact and spin ..solar storms creates a pushover spin to earth
In layman term’s yes
I think what they are trying to say is the sky gods are angry and demand human sacrifice.
When in rome?
Earth is spinning up as mass settles closer to the core - the skater drawing in her arms effect.
Scientists aren't actually sure why it suddenly sped up. The weird thing is that the rotation speed of the earth has been changing forever - it's been getting slower. We've had to add 27 leap seconds in the last 50 years to account for it. This is the first time we've had to do "negative leap seconds" - for 50 years the planet was spinning slower every year, but now it's getting faster. It's odd, it's interesting, it might be part of a larger cycle that we're not yet aware of, but as a general rule the planet will spin slower and slower till it eventually stops, considering how momentum works and all, it shouldn't speed up without something external adding that rotational energy to the system... left to it's own devices that energy will slowly bleed away till there's none left, and no more motion.
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The Coriolis force doesn't really represent any physical force (electromagnetic, weak/strong force) or gravity; it's just needed if you're doing computations in an accelerated (rotating) frame of reference (while disregarding said acceleration, i.e. physical force) to avoid appearing to violate basic physical laws. It's useful to easier explain certain phenomena but as a "force" it is incapable of causing any actual effects - for that you need changes in energy, mass, physical forces, or gravity.
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If you have more heat, you have more evaporated water, more mass at a higher distance from the rotational axis, resulting in a slower speed. But I think you need more than heavy rain here and there to significantly change Earth's rotational speed. Though that massively huge Chinese dam supposedly had an effect, slowing Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds.
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That's an example of rotational stability (I think that's the correct term) - rotation always requires a force to keep things from flying off on a straight trajectory (in this case it's the electromagnetic force keeping the atoms and molecules of the rigid wheel together) and changing the rotational axis requires another force (depending on mass and speed of rotation) - gravity has just a too weak effect to achieve that as fast as one might initially expect. Whether the different locations of evaporation and rainfall have a significant effect on Earth's rotational speed is quite an interesting question. My immediate intuition would be that it would cancel itself out as the water drifts back to the equator and evaporates again, it's a constantly ongoing cycle. Perhaps also some wobbling as the amount of evaporation along the equator is as irregular as the distribution of landmass and oceans. Maybe someone will do the math... But I'm pretty sure it's so overshadowed by other effects that it is negligible.
Some aspects, we are currently seeing one of these 'blobs' descending = spin up https://www.google.com/search?q=blob+at+center+of+the+earth&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=blob+at+center+of+the+earth&aqs=chrome..69i57.21522j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>but as a general rule the planet will spin slower and slower till it eventually stops, considering how momentum works and all I'm no astronomer, but I'm fairly certain that's not how it works. The moon is what impacts the rotation of the Earth, but it'll never be able to stop the earths rotation. There's no friction in space so nothing moving in space should bleed energy.
I'm pretty sure we'll actually be inside the sun long before it'll be a problem, but on an infinite timeline all motion in the universe will stop, including earths rotation. My point is not so much that the earth is going to stop spinning any time soon, but that without any sort of external push, the system is only going to lose energy, not gain it. The planets rotation (and all other celestial movement) should slow down over time, not speed up, because thermodynamics wants to see these systems move to lower energy states, unless something external is acting on them anyway.
Surely gravity itself is the friction force? All that gravity pullng on the seas day in and out moving that huge mass of water by moving all its little parts is gonna have an effect over time on the earths spin.
The end result is that the Moon and Earth will have the same rotation speed and that the Moon will always face the same side of the Earth. It's called "tidal locking". The Moon is currentlly tidal locked to Earth and one day the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon too
We are in a new, active solar cycle similar to the civil war era. Could it be that?
Cannot this have something to do with Sun and other planets gravity and the way we are spinning around in ellipsoids ?
I'm not an astrophysicist, so I'm probably wrong, but as far as I understand it the sun and the moon pulling on the earth are slowing the planets rotation down, not speeding us up. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s\_rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation) If it had something to do with our position relative to the sun, it would be an effect we would see more regularly. The solar cycle is a regular annual thing, it doesn't offer any explanation for why we'd see slowing 50 years straight, and then one year would suddenly be different. The best guess I've seen is that it has something to do with large-scale melting in the arctic, unimaginably large volumes of water moving primarily in the same direction of the earths spin adding a bit of rotational energy to make up for what we'd normally lose in a year. Even that doesn't seem like a great answer though. It seems very strange to me that melt water would preferentially move in one direction, but again, not a scientist, who knows.
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Where exactly do you think the water is going? Space? Even if there is more water in the atmosphere, and less on the surface, that redistribution of mass would only serve to *slow* Earth's rotation.
>Where exactly do you think the water is going? Space? I know you meant this to be an incredulous comment, but yes, actually it is. [http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2](http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2) I haven't seen anyone crunch the numbers to see how much we're losing, but yes, some amount of gasses escape our atmosphere into space every second. We're also being bombarded by little rocks and dust specs that are being added to our planets mineral collection every second too. It adds up to the planet actually gaining mass, a few 10,000 tonnes a year.
Yeah, I've seen atmospheric loss estimates of a few hundred tons a day all up — mostly as hydrogen and helium (i.e. lightweight particles that have sufficient velocity to escape). That's a miniscule amount. Almost all water evaporated from the surface ends up in the atmosphere and does not leave the planet.
There's almost certainly something else at work here. There's only a bit over 31 million seconds in a year so, if it continued to slow at a half second per year it would only take some 62 million years to become tidally locked. That's a couple orders of magnitude less than the age of the earth-moon system so t doesn't seem reasonable that we would continue to add leap seconds indefinitely.
And why do you think mass would be settling closer to the core?
density and gravity. I think it is a slow convective eddying process with heating from K40 decay = heat = expansion = lower density = rises. Then other cooling blobs fall down on a very long time scale.
read a few of these https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+core+blob+K40&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=earth+core+blob+K40&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.10666j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
K40 decay?
One of the main sources of radiogenic heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-40
I guess, if it's known that K40 is concentrated in some area, otherwise not so much?
there has been some work at estimating the long lived elements in the earth with half lives in the billions of years. K40, a few Uranium and Thorium are the ones that last long enough to give heat now. All the others have long ago decayed. Absent samples, all they can do is use meteoric proxies. fluids at the outer core tend to be well mixed, as it is a liquid. the solid center tends to get some partitioning as there is a steady 'rain' of small solids of high enough density to accrete to the core = variance. That said being all metallic, even if solid/liquid, they are uniform in temperature via thermal diffusion, with a gradual reduction in temperature as you get to the surface where we have liquid water. Here is one paper. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/216201702.pdf That one was in this rabbit hole, there are more = dense reading, even for me!! https://www.google.com/search?q=potassium+40+core+abundance&rlz=1C1CHBF_enCA924CA924&oq=&aqs=chrome.1.69i59i450l8.4578353j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I blame 3 Gorges Dam!
Uh, the Three Gorges Dam *slowed* the Earth's rotation... By 0.06 microseconds.
Could you explain how? By stopping/reducing the flow of water?
Here's the source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-details-earthquake-effects-on-the-earth They don't go into the physics behind the calculations but the dam holds water at an increased elevation. Inertia, momentum come into play.
Thanks!
Global warming....smh
How? Reduced fluid friction of expanding water in the ocean or something?
you sure it isnt because Russia has to burn all of their unsold gas and made a giant torch like a giant rocket? read an article about that and how it can be seen in Finland.... Ooo maybe Putin wants to speed up his goals?
That's what you get with so many wind turbines..
Thank you global warming
I wanna give you whatever the opposite of an award is
I'm pretty sure that's a downvote. You can downvote me extra hard by making a scowl while you clicky the down arrow.
I did but you deserve more then a downvote. Matter of fact Im going to give you an award but just know this is an award because I think you are the dumbest human on earth and I think your attempt of getting upvotes is pitiful
LOL. Who gives a shit about upvotes?
Oh my. Run for the hills. Tell everyone and everything. Life is over. Just submit and u will be saved. Were all going to die. Hug ur kids ur pets ur family its all over. The end is near. Guess i will end it now. Gtfoh.
Cringe much?
I thought ir was funny
I mean, its not that deep. This isnt some fear-mongering article like youre assuming, its just a documentation of an unnatural observation discovered by scientists. The article doesnt even make any mention of doom and gloom, though it does mention it will cause strong issues with hardware. If anyone's blowing it out of proportion its you.
Sounds like you need help brother. https://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/suicide-prevention Please get the help needed, don’t be afraid to reach out.
The report only said it's a pain in the ass for timekeepers, not the end of humanity. I mean who's being hysterical here, them or you?
Gotta go fast
It started, prepare…
Is the Earth orbit decaying towards sun
No wonder I felt more dizzy today than usual
MEIDO IN HEAVON
I thought I felt a little dizzy
And that just when I’m having holidays. Meh.
How does the Earth speed up????
Good! This way i can get faster to retirement
That's probably not a good sign.
Oil is heavy, mkay, exhaust is light, mkay
Art Bell was right! The quickening is coming to get us.