Climate change is altering the Earth's rotation and making day longer
Climate change affects Earth's rotation by melting ice, shifting mass, and altering the axis. Research suggests human-induced changes may surpass the moon's influence. Accurate models aid space navigation amidst rotational variations.
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Climate change is altering the Earth's rotation by affecting the planet's axis and the length of the day. Researchers at ETH Zurich have found that as ice melts due to global warming, the Earth's rotation changes. The study shows that climate change will have a greater impact on the Earth's rotational speed than the moon, which has traditionally influenced it. The melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica is shifting mass, affecting the rotation. The research, supported by NASA, indicates that human-induced climate change could surpass the moon's influence on the Earth's rotation. The study also reveals that shifts in mass due to melting ice not only impact the rotation speed but also alter the Earth's axis of rotation. By combining physical laws with artificial intelligence, researchers have developed models to predict these changes accurately. Understanding these effects is crucial for space navigation, as even small deviations in Earth's rotation can have significant implications for space missions.
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5 commentsIt bothers me how what actually happened (“correlation found”) gets translated into a story read by the public (“x causes y”) when the average person likely has no sense of the relative strength of different types of findings which are all messaged as “x causes y”.
This seems to happen a lot in climate science, cosmology and social science due to the physical or ethical impossibility of running controlled experiments. I really don’t think the general public understands the scientific method well enough that this distinction doesn’t need to be pointed out when results are published in the media.
> In the PNAS study the ETH Zurich researchers show that climate change is also increasing the length of the day by a few milliseconds from its current 86,400 seconds. This is because water is flowing from the poles to lower latitudes and thus slowing down the speed of rotation.
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