This slowdown, invisible to the naked eye yet tangible in precise calculations, raises major questions about the impact of climate change on our planet and the future length of our days. At the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris, scientists compare ultra-precise atomic clocks with the Earth's actual rotation. The Earth's slowdown no longer follows the steady pattern known to scientists, and the cause is now no longer an external force from space, but the movement of water on the planet's surface itself. The melting of polar ice and the redistribution of water between the poles and oceans increases the Earth's moment of inertia, thereby slowing its rotation at an unusual rate. The change is slight. These microscopic organisms retain chemical fingerprints of past sea levels, which allowed for inferences about the impact of its changes on the length of the day. From time to time, these comparisons require the addition of a single leap second to the global time system to compensate for the discrepancy between atomic time and the Earth's natural rotation. The results showed that the current rate of slowdown is unprecedented since the Pliocene epoch, and modern climate change has become a dominant force, surpassing the Moon's influence on the length of the day. Although the change does not exceed fractions of a second, it has major implications for space navigation and Global Positioning Systems that depend on the Earth's precise rotation. What makes this discovery astonishing is that the Earth has not experienced such a phenomenon for millions of years, making humanity's impact on our planet more apparent than ever. The cause was often natural and expected: the Moon's gravity has been gradually slowing the Earth's rotation for billions of years. But in the last decade, the equation changed. However, over decades of accumulated deviation, these fractions of a second disrupt the precise synchronization that modern technology relies on. Researcher Mostafa Kiani Shahfandi described this slowdown as unprecedented due to the rapid melting of ice between 2000 and 2020. To understand the magnitude of this phenomenon, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Vienna analyzed the Earth's rotation records over 3.6 million years using foraminifera fossils. The researchers confirm that this rapid slowdown presents humanity with a new reality: the impact of our activities on the environment is not limited to weather and oceans, but extends to the Earth's rotation itself. The Earth is slowing down, days are getting longer, and the secret lies in the melting of ice and the redistribution of ocean waters. Currently, days are lengthening by about 1.33 milliseconds per century due to climate factors alone. For the first time in 3.6 million years, the Earth has begun to slow down faster than scientists predicted. Since the first adjustment in 1972, 27 seconds have been added.
