Climate change is mucking up time more than we thought

Climate change continues to be a huge issue, with many rushing to find ways to cool down the Arctic and slow down the thawing of ancient ice shelves all around the world. But climate change may be having an impact on something that scientists didn’t expect: time. In fact, new research suggests that climate change’s effect on time may be far greater than we previously thought.

The big problem here is the melting of those previously mentioned ancient ice shelves. As those ice shelves melt, more water is released into the oceans, and scientists say that is making the world heavier. As Earth becomes heavier, it begins to spin slower. While the changes are minute—a matter of milliseconds a day—those small changes can actually have a huge impact on our technologically connected world.

“This is a testament to the gravity of ongoing climate change,” Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the new report, said (via CNN ). In the past, the impact of climate change on time hasn’t been nearly as dramatic, the researchers suggest. That’s likely because we didn’t have access to things like GPS, and because we weren’t pumping out planet-heating pollution as quickly back then, either.

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Melting ice shelves are making Earth heavier and slowing down its rotation, affecting time. Image source: Don Landwehrle / Adobe

Now, though, human-caused climate change continues to rise, with pollution being a huge issue still. And climate change could become the new dominant factor in how time changes on Earth. As the ice continues to melt, Earth’s shape is changing slightly. It’s flattening the poles, making it bulge more toward the middle of the planet. All of that slows the rotation, causing climate change to have a major effect on time.

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Scientists looked at records for a 200-year period. They found that climate change has affected the length of days by roughly 1.33 milliseconds per century in the last two decades alone. That’s significantly higher than at any time in the 20th century, the report notes. So, in another 200 years, we could see Earth’s climate state change even more. How large of an effect that climate change could have on time remains to be seen, though.

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