Even the Earth wanted 2020 to end sooner: last year the planet rotated faster

Even the Earth wanted 2020 to end sooner: last year, our planet rotated faster than usual, scientists say. The edition told in more detail USA Today.

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The 28 fastest days on Earth on record (since 1960) occurred in 2020, when the Earth completed its revolution on its axis milliseconds faster than usual.

According to TimeandDate.com, the Earth is usually good at timing. On average, in relation to the Sun, it rotates every 86 seconds, which is equal to 400 hours. This is called an average sunny day.

“But this is not the most accurate data,” write Graham Jones and Constantine Bikos of TimeandDate.com. “When high-precision atomic clocks were developed in the 1960s, they showed that the length of an average solar day could vary by milliseconds (1 millisecond equals 0,001 seconds).”

The Earth's rotation may change slightly due to the movement of its core, but also, surprisingly, due to the weather and the state of the ocean.

"Changes in the atmosphere, especially atmospheric pressure around the world, and wind movements that can be associated with climate events such as El Niño are strong enough that their influence can be seen in the Earth's rotation," said David Salstein, a scientist. from the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

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El Niño is the periodic natural warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, while La Niña, which was observed towards the end of 2020, is the natural cooling of the same part of the Pacific Ocean. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), while El Niño causes the Earth's rotation speed to slow down, La Niña has the opposite effect.

The recent acceleration of the Earth's rotation made scientists talk for the first time about negative leap seconds. Instead of adding an extra second, which has been done several times before, to compensate for the slowing down of the Earth's rotation, they may have to subtract it.

"It is possible that if the Earth's rotation speed continues to increase, a negative leap second will be required, but it is too early to say whether this will happen," said physicist Peter Wibberley from the UK National Physical Laboratory.

“There are also discussions internationally about the future of leap seconds, and it is also possible that the need for a negative leap second could push the decision towards ending leap seconds permanently,” he said.

Due to the Earth's unstable speed, scientists in the 1950s created an atomic clock to accurately track time. However, as the Earth's rotation can change, the atomic clock moved steadily forward, and the two time indicators diverged further and further.

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To correct this discrepancy, scientists then created UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) to close the gap between Earth time and the atomic clock. However, the atomic clock kept advancing, so at least once every 10 years, scientists added an extra second to UTC to keep them closer together. This is especially important for things like GPS navigation.

“In everyday life, this leap second has virtually no meaning,” Wolfgang Dick, a spokesman for the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, the organization that maintains global time, said in 2016. “But for astronomy, navigation, space flight, and also for computer networks, for stock markets or energy supply, this second is of great importance,” Dick said.

The most recent leap second was added in 2016.

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