Feeling a bit sluggish these days? Feeling as though you're walking knee-deep in oatmeal? Feeling like the world around you is suddenly slowing down, the way you always hoped it would, so you could catch up? You're not wrong, Bunky. From NBC News:
A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise. The author of the study, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, said that as ice at the poles melts, it changes where the Earth’s mass is concentrated. The change, in turn, affects the planet’s angular velocity.
Turns out that Mother Earth may be developing a bit of a middle-aged spread.
Less solid ice at the poles, then, means more mass around the equator — Earth’s waist. “What you’re doing with the ice melt is you’re taking water that’s frozen solid in places like Antarctica and Greenland, and that frozen water is melting, and you move the fluids to other places on the planet,” said Thomas Herring, a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. “The water flows off towards the equator.”
We really have, as Ned Beatty thundered at Peter Finch in Network, meddled with the primal forces of nature here. The ripple effects are beginning to turn into a cascade.
As climate change intensifies, researchers expect ice melt to have an even more profound effect on how the planet spins. “It will have a bigger contribution as time goes on and as melt accelerates, as we expect it’s likely to do,” Herring said. He added that the new study was a thorough, solid analysis that combined research from several disciplines of science. The need for timekeepers to adjust universal time to stay in line with the Earth’s rotation is not a new phenomenon. But historically, that has involved adding leap seconds to the common standard for clocks when Earth’s slowing spin causes astronomical time to fall behind atomic time (which is measured by the vibration of atoms in atomic clocks). Adding or subtracting leap seconds is a pain, because they have the potential to disrupt satellite, financial and energy transmission systems that rely on extremely precise timing.
Sounds really bad. Forward into the past!
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
