Days Are Getting Longer Due to Climate Change, Potentially Affecting Navigation and the Internet, Study Finds

The climate crisis is not only having an impact on temperatures, weather and environment, it’s also affecting the length of a day, according to a new study.

Global heating is causing polar ice to melt, which is altering how fast Earth rotates, making each day longer. It is a shift that will accelerate as long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels that produce planet-warming greenhouse gases.

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” said professor Benedikt Soja of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, as The Guardian reported. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years, and that is striking.”

The length of a day is changing by milliseconds, but it is enough to potentially interfere with technologies that depend on exact timekeeping, such as GPS navigation, financial transactions and the internet.

“All the datacentres that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing. We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft,” Soja said, as reported by The Guardian.

As Earth warms and ice sheets and glaciers melt, the meltwater flows toward the equator, changing the shape of the planet, CNN reported. It becomes flatter at the poles and bulges at the middle, slowing down its rotation.

The international team of researchers looked at data and climate models for the years 1900 to 2100 to investigate the impact of climate change on day length.

The team found that sea level rise fueled by climate change resulted in the lengthening of a day from 0.3 to one millisecond during the 20th century. However, in the past two decades, they found an increase of 1.33 milliseconds each century, which the report said was “significantly higher than at any time in the 20th century.”

The moon’s gravitational pull on the planet’s land and oceans has been causing Earth’s day to become steadily longer over geological time, reported The Guardian.

But the report found that if the trend of warming seas and ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland continues, the days will get longer at a more rapid pace. If humans do not lower their emissions, the climate crisis could lead to a 2.62 millisecond lengthening of a day by century’s end, making it a more significant factor than the moon.

The study, “The increasingly dominant role of climate change on length of day variations,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This study is a great advance because it confirms that the worrying loss of ice that Greenland and Antarctica are suffering has a direct impact on day length,” said Dr. Santiago Belda of Spain’s University of Alicante, who did not participate in the research, as The Guardian reported.

While humans may not perceive the change, it can interfere with systems that rely on atomic time, which is extremely precise and based on specific atoms’ frequency.

“In barely 200 years, we will have altered the Earth’s climate system so much that we are witnessing its impact on the very way Earth spins,” Surendra Adhikari, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist who was one of the authors of the report, told CNN.