The bugs of climate change for several reasons influence the world and our lives. Now this can also affect the amount of time.
You’ve probably heard of “leap seconds” the slice of time that scientists occasionally add to the world’s official time standard to resolve a discrepancy between old-fashioned timekeeping and modern atomic clocks.
But we are approaching a year when a negative leap second may be needed to buy time an unprecedented step that will depend partly on how climate change affects Earth’s rotation, according to a new study.
Finding time
Researchers say time is a waste. So why do we all crave it? This is the specification of special circumstances, that brings the Geophysicist Duncan Agnew, to the study of Time and nature.
Why did one big money become a big deal?
In our technologically interconnected age, many devices and systems rely on sharing some real-time awareness. While current systems focus on leap seconds a lot, experts say, a poor leap second — or a minute that’s only 59 seconds — can cause problems.
“Not even a few years ago that would have been good and made a lot of time, ” Agnew said through Weby Saniego College.
But because having a new problem affects how the world is moving, he adds, the second unstable sign is now similar.
He said: “One second doesn’t seem like much, but in today’s interconnected world, getting the timing wrong can cause serious challenge.”
Leap seconds have long drawn criticism, in part because of the havoc they can wreak on areas like online reservations and business systems. A few years ago, the engineers at Meta criticized it, saying that it was a hazardous practice.
“Introducing new leap seconds is a dangerous practice that does more harm than good and should be replaced,” it says.
“In 2012, Facebook’s second big jump caused Facebook’s Linux servers to overload trying to figure out why they were sent one second into the past,” the Data Center Dynamics website said.
Why do we have so few seconds?
They were created to bridge the gap between traditional astronomical time and a new international reference based on atomic clocks, known as Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. It is a system that, for many years, has been complicated by various changes in the world’s rotation.
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“In the 1960s, the Earth was shrinking, so it was rotating more slowly than in the 19th century, which explained the atomic number two,” Agnew writes.
If daylight saving time seems difficult, try telling the time on the moon.
The first leap second was added in 1972.
During the first decades, this process became almost annual. During the past 23 years, scientists added only four seconds of jumping, as Agnew is available.
“Since 1972, the negative movement of the world has been asked in 20 seconds,” says ideas from the Department of Department of International and France, and the conversations published on nature in search of Agney.
This problem, Agnew says is that translation of the world now seems to be slowly gained more quickly than the time of the setting.
Why does the climate change affect?
First: the rotation of the earth is not as sharp as the surface. There is a different oscillation – and certain things can affect it, from strong earthquakes, to what is happening in the core of the earth, to how water is distributed. The energy is complex; it is also important to take into account the gravitational pull produced by large ice and glaciers.
Several decades ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is shrinking. But recently they have seen the passage of the planet. In the summer of 2022, NPR is mentioned one in a short day.
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And this is where things get a little weird. Human-induced climate change is slowing the planet’s rotation, Agnew explains, because as ice melts at the poles, the planet becomes a little more oblong – wider at the equators – and less spherical. This means that the Earth rotates a little more slowly, like when an ice skater extends his arms instead of pulling them inward.
The bottom line for timekeepers, according to the new study, is that climate change appears to have delayed, at least a little, the potential need for a negative leap second.
“According to Agnew’s calculations, changes in polar ice mass have delayed this eventuality by another three years, to 2029,” writes Harvard University geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica in Nature’s discussion of the new study.
The negative leap
“A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so the problems it could create are without precedent,” Tavella wrote.
He said: “Meteorologists [not a typo: the study of meteorologists and applied science to measurement all over the world are closely following this discussion, “The aim is to avoid any unnecessary risks,” he added.
Agnew says that even if a few seconds are added without doing anything, it remains to be seen how computers and networks will handle the time loss. Time is more critical than it seems
“Many systems have software that can accept fractions, but few if any allow for fractions to be removed, so unexpected jumps are expected.” a knife will cause a lot of problems,” she said.
Other solutions may present themselves. In 2022, the General Assembly on measures and measures decided to eliminate the second jump by 2035. The organization can decide to remove the second negative jump right before this deadline.
Agnew suggests that UTC’s decision-making body should adopt a new rule: “Don’t let it be” a second negative increase.
