Scientists have learned about the slowing down of the Earth's rotation due to climate change

An international team of scientists has found that global climate change has led to a slowdown in the Earth's rotation at a rate that is unprecedented over the past 3.6 million years. This was reported by the BBC Science Focus magazine.

According to experts, due to the melting of the polar ice sheets and glaciers, water is moving from the poles to the equator. This process, according to scientists, redistributes the mass of the planet. As a result, the length of the Earth's day increases by 1.33 ms for every 100 years.

Experts note that the energy costs of such a change are comparable to the energy of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.

To analyze the historical retrospective, the researchers applied machine learning algorithms to data on the fossils of benthic foraminifera, single—celled organisms that lived on the seabed. The chemical composition of their shells allowed us to reconstruct the chronology of changes in sea level and the speed of rotation of the planet since the Late Pliocene epoch.

The lead author of the work, Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi from the University of Vienna, added that if the level of fossil fuel emissions remains high by the end of the century, the climate's influence on the Earth's rotation may exceed the gravitational influence of the Moon. Despite the fact that changes are measured in milliseconds, they are critically important for the operation of GPS navigation and spacecraft control systems.

Currently, the scientific group is studying other factors of anthropogenic impact on the planetary mass, in particular, depletion of groundwater reserves and changes in the global water cycle. According to preliminary estimates, these effects are smaller in scale than the melting of glaciers, but their consideration is necessary for an accurate understanding of the dynamics of the Earth's rotation.

Recipe for a planet: how life appeared on Earth

Scientists have suggested that the Earth could be much more autonomous.

The Magazine Phys.org On May 31, he spoke about the formation of planets around supermassive black holes. According to a computer model, the dust disks around these objects are suitable for the formation of millions of new worlds. Scientists have also predicted the appearance of exotic massive bodies consisting mainly of dust — nothing like this has yet been discovered in known planetary systems.