Melting glaciers blamed for subtle slowing of Earth’s rotation

The movement of ice and meltwater is also causing a slight migration of the Earth’s axis, or north pole, in a phenomenon known as “polar wander”, the researchers said.

This could also affect sunset times, as the length of Earth’s day depends on the speed at which the planet rotates on its axis.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the average sea level around the world is now set at around 3 millimeters. However, that rate can also be slowed or sped up in the short term by several factors.

Much of the change in sea level during this period of time has been due to the natural process of glacial recession since the last ice age, but the team was able to correct previous miscalculations about the correlation between sea level change and Earth’s rotational spin by factoring in updated numbers on 20th century sea level changes, among other things.

But to officially solve Munk’s original thesis, Mitrovica’s team lowered Munk’s estimate of sea level rise over the 20th century by 30 percent (equating to 1 or 1.5 millimeter each year).

Two researchers check the melting permafrost of the Arctic ice cap.

So, if you’re the kind of person who lives by the motto that every moment counts, try to make the most of those extra fractions of fractions. This in turn causes the Earth to slightly wobble as it spins on its axis.

The study, published this week in the journal Science Advances, concluded that shrinking glaciers are affecting the speed of the Earth’s rotation and how our planet is tilted on its own axis by redistributing all the once-frozen water around the world. It looks like the adjustment of Earth’s rotation on its axis it’s a problem that has been debated before by an oceanographer called Walter Munk.

The researchers added that missing piece of information to their calculations, along with the latest tide gauge and satellite data about the amount of sea-level rise and post-glacial rebound.

“If you are melting glaciers from high latitudes-in Alaska, Greenland, or Iceland-you move mass away from the pole, toward the equator, which slows the Earth down”, said Jerry Mitrovica, the study’s lead author and a Harvard geophysicist who specializes in studying sea level change. As a outcome of Earth rotating more slowly, the length of our days is slowly increasing.

But they also found, in their observations, that interactions between the mantle and outer core of our planet were not slowing the planet’s spin as much as Munk said they would, and therefore, the scientists concluded future spin will be faster than previously estimated.