The results of the research are far from encouraging, and even alarming to some experts.
The reduction of polar ice due to human-induced climate change has slowed down the Earth's rotation. This can affect the timing.
According to Babel, this is stated in a study published in the scientific journal Nature.
The melting of the ice caps is slowing the Earth's rotation so much that the next leap second — a mechanism used since 1972 to match the official time on atomic clocks with time based on the Earth's erratic rotation rate — will be delayed by three years.
Less solid and dense ice in the northern and southern parts of the planet means that there is now more mass around the equator.
"If you have a skater who starts spinning, if she puts her arms down or stretches her legs, she's going to slow down. However, if the skater's arms are retracted inward, it means that she will rotate faster," Duncan Agnew, the author of the study, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, explained the rotation of the Earth using the example.
Global warming and sea level change will push back the need for another leap second from 2026 to 2029. Even earlier, scientists recognized that leap seconds cause great destruction to computing, and therefore decided to get rid of them after 2035.
However, researchers are now particularly worried about the fact that the next extra second will be negative for the first time, that is, skipped, rather than extra.
"We don't know how to deal with missing one second. That's why metrologists are worried," said Felicitas Arias, former director of the time department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres.
Leap seconds lead to serious failures in computing systems — in all modern computer codes, an additional "negative" second is not taken into account.
Read also: Daylight saving time: when and how Ukrainians need to change their clocks
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