Washington [US], July 16: Scientific research has found that the climate crisis is making days longer, as melting polar ice reshapes the planet.
The length of the day on Earth has been increasing over geological time due to the gravitational pull of the moon on our planet's oceans and land.
However, human-induced melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is redistributing stored water from high altitudes to the sea, resulting in more water in equatorial waters.
This causes the Earth to bulge, reducing the time it takes for the planet to rotate around its axis and making the days longer .
"We can see that humans affect the entire Earth system, not just locally, such as increasing temperatures, but also shaking it at a fundamental level, such as interfering with the way the planet moves in space and rotates on its axis," Professor Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich (Switzerland) told The Guardian .
The phenomenon of longer days is a dramatic demonstration that human actions are changing the Earth, comparable to the impact of natural processes that have existed for billions of years.
"Because of carbon emissions , it only takes humanity 100 to 200 years to make these changes," Professor Soja said of the climate crisis .
The length of the day is changing at the millisecond level, but it is still enough to disrupt internet operations, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping, according to a report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA .
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper