Overview
- The paper in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth estimates the climate-driven lengthening at about 1.33 milliseconds per century, the fastest rate in 3.6 million years.
- Authors Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi (University of Vienna) and Benedikt Soja (ETH Zurich) attribute the modern increase mainly to human-caused warming and associated sea-level rise.
- Analyses of benthic foraminifera chemistry, combined with a physics-informed diffusion deep-learning model, enabled a reconstruction of sea-level and rotation changes over 3.6 million years.
- The 2000–2020 period shows an unusually rapid rise in day length, with only a phase about two million years ago approaching a comparable rate.
- The team warns that, if current ice loss persists, the climate effect could rival or exceed lunar tidal braking by late century, complicating UTC adjustments and precision systems such as GPS, space navigation, and astronomical timing.