2024 - earth spinning slower:
The effect of melting polar ice could delay the need for a ‘leap second’ by three years.
www.nature.com
2022 - earth spinning faster:
On June 29, 2022 our planet set a new record for its shortest day. Here's everything you need to know about Earth spinning faster.
www.forbes.com
Interesting observation, you must be plugged into some interesting sites. For all the dismissal of the general public, there's a lot of clever and attentive people floating around in the hoi polloi (of which we are a part).
That said, I'm not buying the flat earth hypothesis but since you're not stupid there must be something curious in the subject that there's no harm in entertaining (not that I think it's actionable).
So, the importance of reading more than the headline - especially on something that seem so dissonant. Below are excerpts from your two articles with a supplement article to conclude.
This is from Nature, a leading academic journal. It has a status similar to something published by the Royal Society back in the day.
'“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla,
California, and author of the study.
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
According to his analysis, global warming will push back the need for another leap second from 2026 to 2029.
...
Earth’s spin is slowing down, meaning that, occasionally, a minute in utc needs to be 61 seconds long, to allow Earth to catch up. This reduction in the planet’s rotation rate is caused by the Moon’s pull on the oceans, which creates friction. It also explains, for example, why eclipses 2,000 years ago were recorded at different times in the day from what we would expect on the basis of today’s rotation rate, and why analyses of ancient sediments suggest that 1.4 billion years ago, a day was only around 19 hours long.'
Climate change has slowed Earth’s rotation — and could affect how we keep time - nature journal
The second is from Forbes, an elite focused magazine that generally has a high standard to its content.
'Why is Earth speeding up?
The cause of the differing speed of Earth’s spin is unknown, but theories abound:
- The melting of the glaciers means less weight on the poles
- Motions of our planet’s inner molten core
- Seismic activity
- The “Chandler wobble”—the movement of Earth’s geographical poles across its surface'
Earth Is Suddenly Spinning Faster. Why Our Planet Just Recorded Its Shortest Day Since Records Began - Forbes
These two articles are clearly contradictory - although
the poles were ice free for most of the earth's history, so there may be something to this that we don't understand.
The moon was much closer to the earth in astronomical time. One would expect that it would have had a greater effect then than now. This is an explanation from a random millennial internet site that's well established and mainstream.
'As the ages pass, the Moon slowly drifts away from the Earth. In conjunction, the length of our day gradually gets longer. For the first time, astronomers have been able to estimate the length of the day and the distance to the Moon as it was almost two and a half billion years ago.
Back then, our day was only 17 hours long.
...
“Today, this distance is around 384,300 kilometers. On average, of course, because the Moon doesn’t make a perfect circle around the Earth; its orbit is an ellipse. During the time interval that we studied, the Earth-Moon distance was a lot shorter: around 321,800 kilometers,” says scientist
Margriet Lantink in a
statement.
That means the Moon was about 62,000 kilometers closer to Earth, or 38,525 miles — 22,000 or so Golden Gate Bridge lengths.
...
The current distance to the Moon gives us the very special phenomenon of total solar eclipses. This can only be possible if the apparent size of the Sun and the Moon are the same in our sky. While that’s true for now, in a few hundred million years, the Moon will be too far away, and it will be too small to give us total solar eclipses. So enjoy them while they last.'
2.46 billion years ago, ancient Earth had way shorter days and bigger Full Moons - Inverse
There was an observation I recall reading somewhere about the fine-tuned universe theory but, in this case, related to astronomy. It said that if there were no eclipses of the moon then astronomical knowledge would never have experienced stepped change due to the ability to observe the corona of the sun during an eclipse.
That the earth had a moon that was capable of producing total eclipses was an incredible improbability and it seems that the moon will only able to do this during a window of earth's lifetime. It's also a curiosity but an interesting observation. The perfection of earth for the development of intelligent life etc. Given that there is a full eclipse that seems to have put the ants in the pants of many, I offer this as a curious piece of information.
The larger issue that you refer to is
the breakdown of the chain of trust. Are these wonders of the modern age (the scientific journals and institutions that have produced wonders of technological productivity and improvements in standards of living) been instrumentalised to game the system?
Or is science subject to wild speculations that we should register but not take too seriously until it produces useful engineering? The
replication problem and a junk science confusion of reasonable discourse?
Thus, this is a question of actionability. Clearly everything that appears in a scientific journal shouldn't create a necessary call on resources.
A response could be that our knowledge of the earth (given the period of time we have experience of) is like landing on an alien world. At first, every day would be new and different. We would have a blurry picture of what the seasons would look like. After a few years, our understanding would get a bit better but we would hardly be able to say that we understood how the climate would act over a decade or a century.
Our understanding of earth's climate may reach back further but it is still of a resolution that we cannot say that we understand it. We have not had sensors recording macro or micro details for more than a handful of decades, although we have information on obvious events going back millennia. Therefore, would should be cautious of proclamations of certainty and careful of overgrowing sectors that might be structurally wont to create feedback loops to sustain themselves.
