Scientists claim that on June 29, 2022, the Earth was spinning faster than usual, making it the shortest day on record since the 1960s.
The average length of a day is 24 hours (or exactly 86,400 seconds). According to CBS, speaking to Leonid Zotov, a scientist at the Sternberg Institute of Astronomy at Lomonosov Moscow State University, June 29 was 1.59 milliseconds shorter.
Zotov and a team of scientists recently published a study outlining possible hypotheses for the Earth’s new, accelerated rotation.
They report that the Earth has been spinning faster since 2016. According to the Guardian, the year 2020 marked 28 of the shortest days on record in the past 50 years. (However, not every day is shorter than 24 hours.)
The increased rotational speed came as a surprise to scientists, who, Zotov and his peers wrote in the study, previously believed that the Earth had been slowing down over the past centuries.
Scientists haven’t been able to say for sure what caused the speed increase, though Zotov and other scientists will present their research and theories at this month’s Asia and Oceania Geoscience Society conference.
Zotov told CBS that he believes Earth’s tides may play a role in why the planet is spinning faster.
According to Forbes (who also spoke to Zotov), the decay in “Chandler Wobble” may be the reason for the change in acceleration. Chandler Wobble involves the movement of geographical poles across the surface of the globe, since the Earth is a living, moving planet.
Don’t tell the government, they’ll add a planetary spinning tax to try and slow it down.
The Earth is spinning faster than usual, and we had the shortest day in modern history https://t.co/6c43Cd5AMD– Dustin Mega Hipster Morris (@DustinMorris13) August 5, 2022