Scientists have recorded June 29, the shortest day in the history of the Earth

Scientists recorded on June 29, 2022 the shortest day in the history of the Earth in the entire history of observations. They were 1.59 milliseconds shorter than a typical 24-hour day. This indicates the acceleration of the rotation of the Earth around its axis, informed on Thursday the American magazine The Smithsonian on its website.

“Recent measurements from atomic clocks indicate that the rotation of the Earth is gradually accelerating. For example, back in 2020, scientists recorded 28 of the shortest days ever observed. Another record short day was recorded in July,” the article says.

According to the current ideas of geologists and astronomers, the Earth and other planets rotated very quickly in the early stages of their existence, but later the speed of movement around their axis decreased. In the case of our planet, the reason was the appearance of the Moon in the orbit of the Earth, whose constant gravitational interaction with the Earth leads to the fact that the length of the day has been increasing over the past 4.3 billion years.

Scientists have been observing this process for a long time both with the help of atomic clocks and with the help of various ancient evidence and chronicles, which allow us to estimate the rate of slowing down of the Earth’s rotation in bygone eras.

In the past three years, as noted in the report, scientists have noted the opposite trend – the length of the day began to decrease, not increase. In total, since 2020, astronomers have recorded about 30 record short days, which are inferior in length to all previous measurements since 1973, when scientists began using atomic clocks to observe the length of the day.

So far, researchers cannot determine exactly what the anomalies in the length of the day are associated with. There is an assumption that the reduction in the time of day potentially indicates that the rotation of the planet around its axis is gradually accelerating, which may be caused by various changes in the circulation of rocks within the planet.

Russian and foreign astronomers led by Leonid Zotov, a senior researcher at the SAI MSU, put forward a hypothesis that such anomalies are generated by the so-called “Chandler wobble.” This is how scientists determine small periodic shifts of the axis of rotation and geographic poles of the Earth, the origin of which has not yet been fully studied.

Over the past five years, as the researchers noted, the strength of such swings has declined sharply, the reason for this has not yet been established. The slowdown of the wobbles, according to Russian scientists, is the main reason why the speed of the Earth’s rotation began to grow. Further observations of “Chandler’s swings” and the length of the day will help to prove or disprove this hypothesis.