Something is making the Earth spin faster and days shorter
has felt more nebulous than ever. You'd be forgiven for thinking that days are passing by at an increasingly faster clip. According to scientists, that perspective is not wrong. On June 29th, midnight arrived 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected. It was the shortest day in over half a century, at least since scientists started tracking the pace of the Earth's rotation withThat wasn't a one-off occurrence either.
Scientists believe there are a number of factors that may impact the Earth's rotation, including earthquakes, stronger winds, icecaps melting and refreezing, the moon and the climate. Some have suggested the so-called"Chandler wobble" may have an effect on the rotation too.
, which have caused outages at Reddit and Cloudflare over the last decade. A negative leap second could lead to even more chaos. "With the Earth’s rotation pattern changing, it’s very likely that we will get a negative leap second at some point in the future," Meta engineers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi."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."
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