Will the Earth really rotate faster in 2020?

Some scientists predict that by 2020 the planet will rotate faster. However, others call for relativism, believing it to be a normal occurrence, not a trend.

Many scientists in recent days have agreed that the Earth will never change as fast as it did in 2020. According to them this year, the planet will be 28 times more broken than the previous record of the short day. 2005. It will have circled at a speed of 1.4602 milliseconds on July 19, 2020, and may break this record again in 2021.

“The Earth has not changed rapidly in the last 50 years now,” the newspaper promises Telegraph Peter Whipperley, researcher at the British National Laboratory (National Physics Laboratory).

Spend a second from the world’s clocks?

“Since 2016 we have observed the acceleration of the Earth’s rotation and we do not know how to interpret it,” he added. Point Christian Bizard, astronomer in the Department of Time-Space Reference Systems (SYRTE) at the Paris Laboratory.

As the Earth’s rotation speed continues to increase, British scientist Peter Whipperley believes it can take a second out of the world’s clocks so that they are aligned exactly with the Earth’s rotation. However, he agrees that it is too early to say whether this is necessary.

“If this acceleration continues at a rate of about 0.3 milliseconds per year, within four to five years, one second would have to be deducted from the legal time,” says the weekly astronomer, the Defender of the Unified Universal Time (UTC), a time scale based on atomic clocks.

However, due to an international conference from the 1970s, this should never be more than a second compared to the time of the Earth’s rotation.

Normal speed differences

Within the scientific community, others tend to reconsider the phenomenon and consider these reports to be exaggerated. First, although the Earth has been spinning at high speeds for many years now, the “saved” time is very small, which should be significant on our scale. It is even dangerous to assume that this is a common trend.

In fact the speed of the Earth’s rotation varies constantly, and depends on many factors, such as the motion of the oceans, the natural gravity of the Moon, the motions of the Earth’s melting center, or atmospheric pressure. It is therefore natural for the average length of a day to experience seasonal fluctuations in the order of one millisecond.

“Earth (speed of rotation) more stable by 2020” promises online science journal Reverse James O-Donoku, a planetary expert at the Japanese Space Agency. “The effect of deviation was minimal in 2020 and 2021. The average day length in 2020 changed by 0.00127 seconds or 1.27 milliseconds compared to previous years, which is a few hundred milliseconds.”

The Earth periodically accelerates or decreases according to these competing forces, and explains Reverse Matthew Dumberry, professor of physics at the Canadian University of Alberta. “There are many different phenomena that affect the rotation of the earth, all of which occur at different time scales, which we cannot even observe or detect,” he says.

“It’s very easy to see a trend with a magnifying glass and create an extension. However, it is good to know the physical phenomena that cause these changes and to study them over a long period of time,” says the Canadian scientist. According to him, the fact that the planet turns itself quickly “does not translate into an expression of change, it is in progress, it is simply basic physics”.