Climate change changes how we tell time

News

Climate change changes how we tell time

A recent publication in Nature shows that climate change is slowing the acceleration of Earth’s rotation. This impacts numerous issues, including metrology. Namely, it reduces the need to make corrections to global time measurements.

As the ice caps melt, more melt water moves toward the equator, which slows the rotation a tiny bit. That in turn affects the length of a day and thus the precision of universal time (UTC), which is maintained based on atomic clocks.

We already relatively often add a leap second to a day to keep clocks in sync with the earth’s rotation; soon, however, a “negative leap second” would be required.

Experts previously predicted that this might need to happen in 2025 or 2026. However, due to deceleration caused by climate change, this moment will be delayed until possibly 2029.

While climate change is not good news, this postponement has a silver lining: it also postpones the technical and operational challenges associated with adapting world time, and with it, risks to computer system synchronisation, for example.

Want to know more about the impact of climate change on metrology? Erik Dierikx, VSL expert in time and electricity, recently shared his insights in de Volkskrant as well as on EditieNL (both in Dutch)!