Meta is officially campaigning any future bid at inserting another leap second, hoping for the adoption of a new time-keeping system. While leap seconds have only been added in the past, subtracting a second from the time-keeping cycle will “have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers” with a missing time stamp. The explainer has a ton of technical details, but the risks are real and there’s already some precedent for such a system crash. For example in 2017, Cloudflare servers experienced an outage on new year’s eve when the system panicked after encountering a negative value.
Earth’s speed increase and the shortening of days could be triggered by anything from climate change to tidal movements. Even the Moon’s gravitational pull could be a contributor to the change. According to research published in Nature, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the subsequent tsunami sped up the Earth’s rotation. It mentioned that the change in Earth’s rotational behavior was triggered due to a “shift off mass towards the planet’s center.”
One possible explanation for the latest turn of events is the Chandler Wobble. Discovered by American astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler using a device that he invented called almucantar, the Chandler Wobble refers to the movement of Earth’s pole by 0.7 arcseconds over a span of roughly 14 months. Scientists believe that it is caused by changes in pressure, temperature, and salinity at the bottom of oceans.
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