You can't feel it, but Earth's spin is easing off the gas. The Wall Street Journal reports the length of a day has been creeping longer, increasing by about 1.33 milliseconds per century over the past 20 years, according to a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The culprit, researchers say, is ice melt tied to warming temperatures. As ice in places like Greenland and Antarctica turns to water and spreads into the oceans, mass shifts away from the poles and the planet's rotation slows.
The team, led by researchers in Switzerland and Austria, says the current rate of slowdown is unprecedented in at least 3.6 million years. To estimate ancient day lengths, scientists analyzed the chemical fingerprints left behind by marine organisms that built shells from seawater, using those clues to reconstruct past sea levels and Earth's rotation. The findings suggest that days will eventually stretch beyond 24 hours, though that process will unfold over millions of years. A few milliseconds may sound trivial, but they matter in a world built on precise timing. GPS systems, navigation apps, satellites, and other technologies rely on accurate measurements of Earth's rotation to function properly.
The new findings also add to growing evidence that moving water around the planet can subtly reshape Earth's motion. A separate 2023 study highlighted by Tech Times found that agricultural groundwater pumping shifted Earth's rotational pole roughly 80 centimeters eastward between 1993 and 2010, making groundwater extraction the largest climate-related driver of polar drift identified by that research. Continued warming could amplify these effects by the end of the century. "We can slow down this trend, but we cannot really reverse it as of now," says Zurich geoscientist Benedikt Soja.
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