March 26, 2026 | 12:12 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A new study has revealed that human-driven climate change is slowing down the Earth's rotation at a rate not seen in the past 3.6 million years, with sea level rise increasing the length of the day by 1.33 milliseconds per century.
As cited by Live Science, the study states that the Earth spins faster when its mass is more concentrated, similar to an ice skater pulling in their arms to speed up and extending them to slow down. The rise in sea level has long been known to redistribute this mass and alter the planet's rotation, but the newly identified rate has never occurred before, according to scientists.
Many factors affect the speed of the Earth's rotation. The gravitational pull of the moon on the planet is the most significant in the long run. "Its gravitational pull creates a bulge in the planet that slows Earth's rotation rate," said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania not involved in this new study, to Live Science. The moon's influence increases the length of the day on Earth by about 2.4 milliseconds per century.
However, this 2.4-millisecond rate is offset by the glacial isostatic adjustment effect, which is the slow rise of the planet's crust that continues after ice sheet melting. The glacial isostatic adjustment shortens the length of the day by about 0.8 milliseconds per century, causing an overall lengthening of background time by 1.71 milliseconds per century (with uncertainty of about 0.1 milliseconds in observations).
Other short-term phenomena also affect the length of the day, including strengthened winds during El Nino events, which slow down the planet's rotation by about one millisecond per century, Mann said.
However, in recent years, the climate seems to be playing an increasingly significant role in altering the Earth's rotation, said co-author of the study Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, a geologist at ETH Zurich. "I wanted to know if this was unusual or something like this happened in the past," Shahvandi told Live Science. "As it turned out, it is quite anomalous. The effect is therefore anthropogenic [caused by humans]."
Shahvandi and study co-author Benedikt Soja, a professor of space geodesy at ETH Zurich, turned to fossilized single-celled shell organisms called foraminifera to look back millions of years to the Earth's day length. Changes in oxygen content in these fossils can reveal the sea level when the organisms were still alive, from which researchers can extrapolate the length of the day.
They found that the current 1.33-millisecond increase in the length of the day is among the fastest changes seen in the past 3.6 billion years. "This is expected to get even larger and even bigger than the effect of the moon," said Shahvandi.
One episode about 2 million years ago showed a similar 2.1-millisecond increase in the length of the day per century, according to the researchers' findings. It occurred in the Early Pleistocene, during a period when atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature increased.
In a future warming scenario where greenhouse gases increase, the length of the day could increase by 2.62 milliseconds per century by 2080, Shahvandi and Soja reported in their study, published on March 10 in the JGR Solid Earth journal.
Although its impact is unlikely to be felt by humans, these findings have other real-world implications. For example, Mann said, instruments that require precise knowledge of Earth's rotation speed, such as those in spacecraft, may need recalibration. Other precise timekeeping applications, such as in computing, may be affected, Shahvandi said.
These findings also underscore the speed of modern warming. "It tells us about the rapid climate change," Shahvandi said, "[the] melting of snow and ice in polar ice sheets and mountains glaciers, and increase in the sea levels."
Read: Earth's Climate More Unbalanced Than Ever, WMO Warns
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