Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, proposes in a piece published in the March 27, 2024 issue of Nature that world timekeeping is under threat as a result of global warming.
A leap second is used in timekeeping to add an extra second to a minute, making it 61 seconds. If a computer network is not aware of these leap seconds, it may fall out of sync with everything else. The article also discovers that if global warming had not existed, this negative leap second would have occurred much sooner.
The relationship between timekeeping and climate change stems from both the history of timekeeping and the geophysics of Earth's rotation. Today's timekeeping is dependent on atomic clocks, which count a specific form of vibration in cesium atoms. However, the Earth's rotational speed varies, and in 2023, the time difference over a year amounted to only 0.03 seconds.
Each year, the rotation rate varies due to two phenomena: the melting of land ice at high latitudes and the slowing of the Earth's liquid core. It would have occurred three years earlier if the Earth's rotation had not slowed due to melting ice. While this deferral allows for additional preparation time, it is insignificant in comparison to the tremendous challenges caused by global warming.
According to Agnew, the ageing of the Earth's rotation rate is another sign that we are having an unprecedented impact on the Earth.
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Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master, it was rightly said. Electronic devices have grown into an inevitable part of our daily lives.
