Is Climate Change Making Days Longer, Slowing Earth's Rotation?

 Apparently, Earth is spinning more slowly than it used to because of climate change.

Earth's rotation has slowed down ever so slightly, due
to, believe it or not, climate change.

It's definitely not slow enough for you to notice it, though. 

It does turn out that melting ice from glaciers and ice caps and such are messing up the Earth's rotation just a little bit.  

According to Nature.com:

"An analysis published in Nature ......has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth's rotation to such an extent that the next leap second - the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth's unstable speed of rotation - will be delayed by three years.

'Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth's rotation has been affected,' says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California and author of the study."

This is all being looked into by metrologists, who are scientists who study measurements, not to be confused with meteorologists, who study weather. 

Precision timing via atomic clocks means every once in awhile adjustments need to be made to match the Earth's rotation. 

Probably due to changes in the Earth's core, the planet's rate of rotation had been increasing a little since the 1970s or so. That has made those occasional leap seconds necessary.

The world-wide bodies that keep track of this sort of thing had scheduled a "leap second" in 2026.  But since the Earth's rotation is now that itty bitty bit slower than it used to be, the leap second has been postponed to 2029.

You wouldn't think Earth's rotation slowing by such a minuscule amount would matter to you and me, but it turns out it does.

Nature.com explains: 

"A delayed leap second would be welcome by metrologists. Leap seconds are a 'big problem' already, because in a society that is increasingly based on precise timing, they lead to major failures in computing systems, says Elizabeth Dooley, who heads the time and frequency division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. "

So, in this case, climate change is doing people a favor, for a change. Obviously the bad greatly outweighs the good, but I suppose there's a bright side to everything.

For now anyway. 

If the Earth's rotation slows enough to require a negative skipped second rather than one being added, it would create a nightmare. There's no accounting for it in all the existing computer codes, so nobody is sure how to make a negative second work.

We should also probably explain why melting glaciers and such are making the Earth's rotation slow down. To understand, it try to think of Earth as a figure skater. 

Nature.com gets into it:

"Data from satellites mapping Earth's gravity show that since the early 1990s, the planet has become less spherical and more flattened, as ice from Greenland and Antarctica has melted and moved mass away from the poles toward the Equator.

Just as a spinning ice skater slows down by extending their arms away from their body (and speeds up by pulling them in), this flow of water away from Earth's axis of rotation slows the planet's spin."

Climate change is why metrologists are worries about "negative leap seconds."  As more and more ice melts from Greenland and Antarctica, the Earth's slowdown will probably continue. 

Scientists plan to eliminate leap seconds in 2035 in favor of much less frequent leap minutes. Leap seconds are just not worth the trouble.