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Study: Climate change may affect the measurement of time

2024-06-09 18:32:00, Kuriozitete CNA

Climate change is not solely responsible for rising sea levels and extreme weather, climate experts say. As Voice of America correspondent Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, a new study says that climate change may also affect global timekeeping.

Accurate timekeeping today is done with the use of about 400 atomic clocks around the world.

The so-called Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is a complex calculation (@TheBIPM/YouTube) made by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and is made in accordance with the speed of the earth's rotation, which has a tendency to change.

"In the 1970s the world decided that the difference between atomic time and the rotation of the earth should not be more than one second. We add a second to our global clock when the difference between two measurement units is about one second," says Patrizia Tavella, director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

Timekeepers have added one second to the timekeeping system 27 times since 1972.

But for several years there have been speculations that it may be necessary to subtract a second.

In a world that relies on the clock, these changes can cause problems.

"In some cases these problems have been big, similar to those of plane landings, because the computers stopped working. And we don't know if this problem would get worse if we drop a second in the current timekeeping system," says Demetrios Matsakis, a former employee of the United States Naval Observatory.

But a new study in the journal Nature says climate change may have pushed the need to turn back the global clock by one second.

"It's gotten warmer in the Arctic and that's caused a lot of melting of the ice that's flowing through the oceans all over the world. Global warming has caused a slowdown in the rate of rotation of the earth," says Duncan Agnew, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

This slowdown creates the need to turn back the global clock by one second between 2026 and 2029. However, this seemingly positive effect cannot be compared to the negative effects of climate change, including sea level rise, says researcher Duncan Agnew . Yale University geophysicist Jeffrey Park agrees with this assessment.

"This is evidence that in fact global warming processes through the melting of the polar ice sheets are affecting this very fundamental feature of our planet: its rotation. The changes are very small, but they can be measured," he says.

Given the problems that a one-second clock change could cause, global timekeeping authorities voted to postpone it until 2035. Discussions on aligning Coordinated Universal Time with the Earth's rotation are expected at the next conference , which will be held in 2026./ VOA