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That sloshing around can influence the speed of the Earth’s spin, ABC reported. Some scientists think this could be the beginning of a new period of shorter days, Interesting Engineering reported.
Earth has reportedly reached its quickest spin speeds in the past half-century.
Earth's rotation is slowing slightly with time; thus, a day was shorter in the past. This is due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth's rotation. Atomic clocks show that the modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago, [1] slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds.
Waves were observed to travel faster between north and south than along the equatorial plane. A model for the inner core with uniform anisotropy had a direction of fastest travel tilted at an angle 10° from the spin axis of the Earth. [15] Since then, the model for the anisotropy has become more complex. The top 100 kilometers are isotropic.
This process alone leads to an increase of the rotation rate (phenomenon of a spinning figure skater who spins ever faster as they retract their arms). From the observed change in the moment of inertia the acceleration of rotation can be computed: the average value over the historical period must have been about −0.6 ms/century.
This minuscule change in time means we might need to consider a negative leap second.
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Precessional movement of Earth. Earth rotates (white arrows) once a day around its rotational axis (red); this axis itself rotates slowly (white circle), completing a rotation in approximately 26,000 years [1] In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow, and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational ...