Another Consequence of Melting Glaciers: Longer Days
Did you know that the melting of glaciers due to global warming not only causes sea levels and air temperatures to rise?
The Earth has already experienced periods of severe warming, and the melting of glaciers and icebergs has had numerous consequences for the entire planet. This is exactly what is happening now, and future generations will feel these changes even more than we do.
The ecological crisis causing glacier melting is mainly due to global warming caused by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Rising temperatures are rapidly melting glaciers, leading to higher sea levels and threatening coastal areas and wildlife. This also reduces the Earth's ability to reflect sunlight, worsening global warming in a harmful cycle.
Recently, an international scientific team found that a systematic decrease in the ice cover leads to a slowdown in the planet's rotation. This, in turn, means that the days will become longer. As their research shows, water flowing from Greenland and Antarctica, i.e., from the north and south, increases the mass of the Earth near the equator. This leads to a decrease in the speed of the Earth's rotation, consequently increasing daylight hours. Fascinating and scary at the same time, right?
To make this discovery, the authors of the study, published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS), used sophisticated methods of observing global processes, including interferometry, which measures radio signals from satellites reaching different points on the surface of our planet. For now, the day may increase by just a few milliseconds over the next few decades, and we won't notice it. However, this increase in time can complicate space satellite flights and experiments in space, as even a small change can affect the quality of communication signals.
These changes are only just beginning: between 1900 and 2024, climate change caused the day length to increase by about 0.8 milliseconds. However, as scientists point out, humanity can influence these processes and cause even greater changes. If greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high rate, global warming will have an even greater impact by slowing down the Earth's rotation rate towards the end of the 21st century. Combined with other changes it is generating in the climate, we can expect increasingly frequent disruptions.