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But after a long trend of slowing, the Earth’s rotation is now speeding up because of changes in its core. For the first time ever, a second will need to be taken off.
Earth has reportedly reached its quickest spin speeds in the past half-century.
The tangential speed of Earth's rotation at a point on Earth can be approximated by multiplying the speed at the equator by the cosine of the latitude. [42] For example, the Kennedy Space Center is located at latitude 28.59° N, which yields a speed of: cos(28.59°) × 1,674.4 km/h = 1,470.2 km/h.
Meanwhile, the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust in some high-latitude regions after the removal of Ice Age glaciers works in the opposite direction, speeding up the planet’s spin.
Any motion of mass in or on Earth causes a slowdown or speedup of the rotation speed, or a change of rotation axis. Small motions produce changes too small to be measured, but movements of very large mass, like sea currents , tides , or those resulting from earthquakes , can produce discernible changes in the rotation and can change very ...
A 1995 model of Earth's dynamo predicted super-rotations of up to 3 degrees per year; the following year, this prediction was supported by observed discrepancies in the time that p-waves take to travel through the inner and outer core. Utilizing both s and p waves dramatically increases the confidence levels of the many seismic data conclusions.
For a while, the scientists reported, the core’s rotation matched Earth’s spin. Then it slowed even more, until the core was moving backward relative to the fluid layers around it.
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