Melting polar ice is changing the way the Earth rotates, making our days longer.

CNN
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Effects human-induced climate change They’re so stressed out that they’re actually messing with time, according to new research.

Melting polar ice caused by global warming is changing the speed of The Earth’s rotation is getting longer and longer each day, a trend that is expected to accelerate this century as humans continue to pump out pollution that is warming the planet, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The changes are small — a matter of a few milliseconds a day — but in our high-tech, hyper-connected world, they have a significant impact on the computing systems we have come to rely on, including GPS.

It’s another sign of the massive impact humans are having on the planet. “This is a testament to the severity of ongoing climate change,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and author of the report.

The number of hours, minutes and seconds that make up each day on Earth is determined by the speed of the Earth’s rotation, which is affected by a complex set of factors. These factors include: Processes occurring in the liquid core of the planetThe continuing impact of the melting of massive glaciers after the last ice age, as well as the melting of polar ice due to climate change.

But over the millennia the Moon’s influence has been dominant, increasing the length of the day by a few milliseconds every century. The Moon exerts a gravitational pull on the Earth that causes the oceans to bulge toward it, gradually slowing the Earth’s rotation.

Scientists have Previously made connections Between melting polar ice and longer days, new research suggests that global warming is having a greater impact on time than recent studies have shown.

The effect of climate change on time “has not been so dramatic in the past,” said Benedikt Soja, study author and assistant professor of space geodesy at the Swiss Federal University of Zurich.

But that could change. If the world continues to pump out pollution that is warming the planet, “climate change could become the new dominant factor,” overtaking the moon. He told CNN:

It works like this: As the world warms due to humans, glaciers and ice sheets melt, and this meltwater flows From the poles toward the equator. This changes the shape of the planet—flattening at the poles and bulging out more in the middle—which slows its rotation.

This process is often compared to an ice skater spinning around. When the skater pulls his arms in towards his body, he spins faster. But if he moves his arms outwards, away from his body, his spin slows down.

An international team of scientists looked at a 200-year period, between 1900 and 2100, using observational data and climate models to understand how climate change has affected day length in the past and to predict its role in the future.

The researchers found that the impact of climate change on day length has increased dramatically.

Sea level rise due to climate change has caused day length to vary by between 0.3 and 1 millisecond in the 20th century. However, over the past two decades, scientists have calculated an increase in day length of 1.33 milliseconds per century, “much higher than at any time in the 20th century,” according to the report.

The report found that if rising levels of pollution continue to warm the planet, warm the oceans and accelerate ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the rate of change is set to increase dramatically. If the world is unable to rein in emissions, climate change could increase the length of the day by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century — outpacing the natural effects of the moon.

“In just 200 years, we will change the Earth’s climate system so much that we will see it affect the way the Earth rotates,” Adhikari told CNN.

A few milliseconds of extra time each day may be imperceptible to humans, but it impacts technology.

Accurate timekeeping is vital to the Global Positioning System (GPS), which everyone with a smartphone has, as well as other communications and navigation systems. These systems use extremely precise atomic time, based on the frequency of specific atoms.

Since the late 1960s, the world has been using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to define time zones. UTC is based on atomic clocks but still keeps pace with the rotation of the planet. This means that at some point, “leap seconds” must be added or subtracted to keep in alignment with the Earth’s rotation.

Some studies have also suggested a relationship between increased day length and “The earthquakes have increased dramatically,” said Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, study author and geologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. But the link is still speculative and more research is needed to prove any clear link, he told CNN.

A research paper on the same topic published in March concluded: who While climate change has been causing the Earth’s rotation to slow down increasingly, processes occurring in the Earth’s core may be more important and may actually be speeding it up, causing the day to shorten.

“We went a little further and re-estimated these trends,” Shahwandi said. They found that any influence from the molten core was less important than the effect of climate change.

The new study, said Duncan Agnew, a professor of geophysics at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of the March study, The study is consistent with his research, “and is valuable because it extends the result further into the future and looks at more than one climate scenario.”

The new research helps inform “a decades-long debate about exactly what role climate change will play in changing day length,” said Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University who was not involved in the study.

While there is now general agreement that climate change will have a “net effect on day length,” she told CNN, there is still uncertainty about which time-influencing processes will dominate this century. This study concludes that climate change is now the second most dominant factor, she said.

“This finding is shocking,” said Soja of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “We have to consider that we are now influencing the Earth’s orientation in space to such an extent that we are controlling influences that have been in place for billions of years.”