> Scientists also noted that this past summer, on July 19, the shortest day ever was recorded—it was 1.4602 milliseconds shorter than the standard.
It’s so interesting to think about (a) how incredibly stable the rotation of the earth in in human terms, and also (b) how far we’ve come to be able to measure something so vast (the rotation of our planet) against a scale so tiny (milliseconds - shorter than an blink).
The world is amazing :)
The semiconductor is pretty good, too, but not nearly as clever.
It changes all the time, the variations are small, the real long term trend is actually for the rotation to slow down, we are not now at a historic extreme. The talks about the leap second are due to cumulative deviations over a few decades, which are normal. The reporting is not factually wrong, but it's limited. Check the LOD (length of day) graphs on the Lick Observatory site:
P.S. gravity isn't constant either[2].
What is it about the Earth's rotation that draws all the crackpot "theorists"?