Earth breaks the record for the shortest day again!
You might not have noticed, but Earth broke its record for the shortest day and set a new one for the shortest rotation in less than 24 hours. This is because the duration of an Earthly day depends on how quickly our planet revolves. On July 29, 2022, our Earth set a new historical record by finishing its whole revolution 1.59 milliseconds faster than its typical 24-hour rotation. Although it only beat the previous record by 1.47 milliseconds or slightly more than one-thousandth of a second, it still beat the standard 24-hour day. On July 19, 2020, the shortest day ever recorded on Earth as well as the shortest month since the 1960s were both noted.
An article from Interesting Engineering claims that our lives are impacted by Earth’s quicker rotation. The reason for this is that atomic clocks used in GPS satellites don’t account for the Earth’s shifting rotation while doing calculations. Therefore, if Earth spins more quickly, it will arrive at the same point a bit sooner. According to reports, “A half-a-millisecond equates to 10-inches or 26 centimetres at the equator. In short, GPS satellites—which already have to be corrected for the effect of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (the curve of space and time)— are quickly becoming useless.”
Your smartphones, computers, and communications systems may also get confused since they rely on Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, which count the seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970. Scientists may also need to add negative leap seconds, which are essentially dropped second, to clear up the uncertainty.
