Earth breaks record for shortest day AGAIN

You might not have noticed, but Earth smashed its own record for completing the rotation in less than 24 hours and has set a new record for the shortest day. That’s because the length of a day on Earth is based on how fast our planet rotates. To make a new record in history, our Earth completed its full rotation in a time that was 1.59 milliseconds lesser than its standard 24-hour rotation on July 29, 2022. Though it is just a little more than one-thousandth of a second, but it broke the previous record of 1.47 milliseconds shorter than a usual 24-hour day. The last shortest day record was observed on July 19 of 2020, which also saw the shortest month that has ever been recorded on Earth since the 1960s.

But why is the Earth spinning faster? The reasons are yet to be known. Though, some scientists believe that this could be possible due to several reasons including the inner or outer layers of the core, oceans, tides, or even changes in climate.

Earth spinning faster, does it have an impact on us?

According to a report by Interesting Engineering, Earth’s faster rotation has an impact on us. It is because atomic clocks which are used in GPS satellites don’t consider the Earth’s changing rotation in its calculation. That means, in case Earth spins faster, then it will get the same position a little earlier. “A half-a-millisecond equates to 10-inches or 26 centimeters at the equator. In short, GPS satellites—which already have to be corrected for the effect of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (the curve of space and time)— is quickly becoming useless,” the report mentioned.

This may also confuse your smartphones, computers, and communications systems, which are based on Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, defined as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970. And to resolve the confusion, scientists may need to add the negative leap seconds, which basically means a drop second.