Many of you readers, if you're like me, are constantly bemoaning the fact that it never seems like we have enough time in a day to get everything done we want to do. This worsens as we get older; it seems we've barely gotten up and dressed (and we older folks get up early) and gotten into the daily routine, when suddenly the supper hour arrives, leaving us wondering just where the heck the day went.
This week, Tuesday will see us suffering more than usual from this unfortunate phenomenon, as the position of the Earth and the Moon in their orbits are going to result in Tuesday being a shorter day than usual: 1.25 milliseconds shorter, that is.
Any normal person would note that number, reflect that this is a time scale that's undetectable by normal means, and dismiss it. But not the UK's Daily Mail; they decided, instead, to engage in some of the most laughable non-scientific panic-mongering I've seen in months - and remember, I cover the climate scolds.
Scientists have warned that Earth's rotation is set to speed up on Tuesday, resulting in one of the shortest days in recorded history.
The change, driven by the moon's gravitational pull, will cause the planet to spin slightly faster at its poles, shaving 1.25 milliseconds off the usual 24-hour day.
While the shift is too small for humans to notice, experts said the long-term implications could be catastrophic.
As the planet spins faster, centrifugal force would begin pushing ocean water away from the poles and toward the equator.
Even a modest increase of just one mile per hour could raise sea levels by several inches in equatorial regions, enough to swamp low-lying coastal cities already on the brink.
Oh no! Bad things could happen if the planet inexplicably starts to rotate faster! And it could be worse if somehow, something really stamps on Earth's rotational gas pedal.
In more extreme scenarios, where Earth spins 100 miles per hour faster, vast areas around the equator could disappear under rising water as polar seas surge southward.
For those who survive the flooding, scientists warn that daily life would grow increasingly hostile as the planet's balance shifts, making this seemingly minor change far more ominous than it appears.
A faster spin would not just shorten the day; it could throw human biology into chaos.
Now this much may have a nugget of truth to it. Humans, like well, everything alive, have what biologists call a circadian rhythm. Our bodies have a sort of internal clock, that's calibrated to the length of Earth's day; the solar day, the stellar day, the sidereal day, you choose, they are all 24 hours long, with very little variation. That could cause some issues with people who traveled to another planet; if you joined a colony on Ceti Alpha Five (I wouldn't recommend it) and it turns out the day there is only 19.5 hours long, you'll be in for some recalibration of your circadian rhythm, which will be bollixed up for a while.
But you're going to have to go to another planet to experience this.
Of course, NASA had to weigh in:
NASA astronomer Dr Sten Odenwald also warned that weather patterns would become more extreme. As the planet spins faster, the Coriolis effect, which causes storms to rotate, intensifies.
'Hurricanes will spin faster and carry more energy,' Dr Odenwald explained.
Here's the problem: The Earth's rotation isn't going to speed up. At all. In fact, it can't. Not for more than the odd 1.25 milliseconds, one day, now and then. In fact, the opposite is true: The Earth's rotation is slowing, it has always been slowing, and it will continue to slow over geologic time. Why?
The Moon.
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The Moon slows the Earth's rotation on the geological timescale because of something called tidal acceleration, wherein the Earth's angular momentum is transferred to the Moon; geologists even know the rate at which this happens, that being r-6, where r is the orbital radius of the Moon. This has been measured and confirmed. As I'm fond of saying, these are facts. The Earth's rotation is slowing, at a rate we can't really easily detect, at a rate outrageously beyond the human lifespan, but slowing, not speeding up.
None of what the Daily Mail breathlessly reports will happen. The Earth isn't speeding up in its rotation. It won't speed up in its rotation. It will slow down, but on a geological time scale, many millions of years beyond human ken. The Daily Mail has served up one of the biggest, steaming heaps of utter codswallop, the most odoriferous, refulgent piles of the malodorous assimilated residue of the digestive processes of the male bovine that we've seen in some time. They should be ashamed of themselves.
So relax. The Earth's rotation isn't speeding up, the Daily Mail is full of horse squeeze, and if you still don't have enough time in the day to get everything you wanted to do done, it's not because of anything to do with the planet's rotation.
