? The globe broke the record for the shortest day... What are the implications
On June 29, 2022, the Earth completed a full rotation of 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, a new record for the shortest day on record.
This month, the globe almost broke the record again, as it recorded on July 26 a rotation around itself less than 24 hours by 1.50 milliseconds.
The Earth's speed has been increasing recently, as in 2020, it experienced the shortest month ever measured, since the 1960s. That year she set the previous record for the shortest day of 1.47 milliseconds in less than 24 hours.
In 2021, the Earth continued to rotate at an increasing rate, despite not breaking new records.
But when we observe this in the long term, it appears that the Earth's rotation is slowing down. Every century, the Earth takes a few milliseconds more to complete one revolution.
Scientists do not know the causes of this phenomenon conclusively, but they are likely to be due to processes in the inner or outer layers of the planet's interior, oceans, tides, or even changes in climate.
If the Earth continues to rotate at an increasing rate, this could lead to the introduction of a negative leap second, in order to keep the rate at which the Earth orbits the sun consistent with the measurement of atomic hours.
However, the negative second is likely to create problems for IT systems. Meta recently posted a blog post stating that adding the leap second is a "risky move that does more harm than good."
This is because the clock will then jump from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before counting back to 00:00:00. Such time will lead to software crashes or data corruption due to timestamps on data storage.
It is noteworthy that the Coordinated Universal Time, the basic time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time, has been updated by leap second 27 times so far, the last of which was in 2016.
Source: MCD
https://shahbapress.net/archives/26729?fbclid=IwAR1IJU51zlHhn9NE0Xkn0IrUVbCCxXms5GXxQnTTAKQb6QgB1zEeGhhOKto