A new study has shown that the effects of human-induced climate change are so significant that they are actually affecting time itself on Earth.
Earlier this week, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that the Earth’s rotation rate is largely affected by significant melting of polar ice caused by global warming, resulting in longer days, ABC7 reported.
In the past, the impact of climate change on time “wasn’t that dramatic,” said Benedikt Soja, study author and assistant professor of space geodesy at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich.
But that could change, according to Soji.
If the world continues to siphon off planet-warming pollution, “climate change could become the new dominant factor,” overriding the moon’s role in slowing Earth’s rotation.
While the changes happen in milliseconds a day, they have an important impact on the computing systems people have come to rely on, including GPS in today’s high-tech, hyper-connected world.
“This is evidence of the severity of ongoing climate change,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the report.
Sea level rise caused by climate change caused the length of a day to vary between 0.3 and 1 millisecond in the 20th century.
But over the past two decades, scientists calculated an increase in day length of 1.33 milliseconds per century, which is “significantly more than at any time in the 20th century,” according to the report.
If planet-warming pollution continues to rise, warming the oceans and accelerating ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the rate of change will increase, the report says.
If the world is unable to curb emissions, climate change could increase the length of the day by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century.
“In barely 200 years, we’re going to change the Earth’s climate system enough to see it impact the very way the Earth spins,” Adhikari told CNN.
