So, are we all time travelers now or what

If you know of anyone messing with the time-space continuum, now might be the time to tell ‘em to knock it off. The 30 shortest days on record have all occurred since 2020 (go figure), ​​with each shaving milliseconds off the typical 24 hours it takes the Earth to complete one spin.

This all culminated less than two months ago, on June 29, 2022, when the planet saw its shortest day since atomic clocks were invented in the 1960s.

⏪⏱ What’s going on?... Short answer: nobody really knows. ​​Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, and its spin is influenced by many factors, including the structure of its interior, the tidal influence of the Moon, and various climatic changes.

While the recent trend of shorter days isn’t particularly alarming, it’s *quite* inconvenient for a couple of groups:

1. International timekeepers, who are in charge of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by which every country sets their clocks.
2. Engineers, who… engineer things. In a recent blog post, engineers at Meta called leap seconds “a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures." (More on leap seconds in a *wait for it* second.🤦‍♀️)

🤔 Looking ahead… When the Earth’s rotation deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, time is literally warped adjusted, called a “leap second.” The last one occurred in 2016. But these adjustments usually only go one way: forward, due to the macro trend of the Earth’s rotation slowing over time… until now.

• With the recent acceleration in Earth's spin, scientists are talking about a negative leap second for the first time ever, though it could also lead to them deciding to end the process for good.