Humanity’s impact on the polar ice sheets is slowing Earth’s rotation, posing a challenge for how it matches up with the official timekeeping.

Humanity is rapidly waking up to the fact that time is running out to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ironically, climate change itself, primarily caused by the release of greenhouse gases via the burning of fossil fuels, could help delay a time-related crisis.

Currently, we keep official time using around 450 ultra-precise atomic clocks to keep Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which was first defined in 1969. A more traditional historical method of time-keeping uses the rotation of Earth. But because Earth’s rotation fluctuates, since 1972, the alignment between these two measurements has been maintained by adding  27 “leap seconds” to the official time standard.

However, new research led by University of California geologist Duncan Agnew suggests that ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica caused by global warming could be impacting Earth’s angular velocity, the rate at which the planet turns, and thus lengthening the day, albeit by an amount so small it is imperceptible to humans—but not to computers that rely on precise timekeeping.

Read more: space.com

Photo: space.com