
5th July was the shortest day this year. Why is the Earth spinning faster this month?
According to data from the Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, reported by CNN, the Earth recorded its shortest day on July 10, by completing a full rotation faster by a fraction of a second (1.36 milliseconds).
Until 2020, the shortest day ever recorded was -1.05 ms, which means the Earth completed its rotation in 1.05 milliseconds less than 24 hours. The Earth has been consistently crossing this number since then, recording its shortest day ever on July 5 (-1.66 ms).
The Earth takes 24 hours to rotate on its axis, a period known as 'Length of Day' or LOD. The LOD may vary by a time frame as unnoticeable as a millisecond (0.001 seconds or 1 ms), and these variations are recorded using devices known as atomic clocks.
The variation in LOD depends on several factors, including the position of the Moon with respect to the Earth's equator, the oceans, and the atmosphere.
The Moon's gravitational pull influences the Earth's rotation speed — it is slower when the satellite is closer to the equator and faster when it's at latitudes farther away from it.
The atmosphere slows down due to seasonal changes, and the Earth compensates for it by rotating faster, as the combined angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant.
As per the same principle, the slowdown of Earth's liquid core has caused the solid Earth around it to speed up.
One reason the trend of faster days has drawn attention is the concept of the 'leap second.' For several decades, Earth was known to be slowing down, making days marginally longer.
This led to adjustments, known as the positive leap seconds, being made to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to slow down the atomic clock and keep it in sync with the phenomenon. This has happened 27 times since 1972.
With the Earth currently recording faster rotations than it used to, the atomic time may need adjustments in the opposite direction by removing a second, called a negative leap second. This has never happened before.
Since so many global systems — including telecommunications, financial transactions, and GPS satellites — depend on accurate timekeeping, it could lead to disruptions akin to the Y2K problem. Hence, scientists are closely monitoring the shortening of days.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


NDTV
9 hours ago
- NDTV
ISRO-NASA's $1.3 Billion Revolutionary Earth Imaging Satellite NISAR Set For Launch
In a historic collaboration between the United States and India, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, also known as NISAR, is poised to revolutionise how we observe and understand our planet. Scheduled for launch on the evening of July 30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota, NISAR represents the largest joint Earth science mission ever undertaken by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The latest NASA-ISRO collaboration follows the successful mission to the International Space Station by Astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla. At its core, NISAR is designed to monitor changes in Earth's surface with unprecedented precision, capturing movements as small as a centimetre. This capability is vital for tracking natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, volcanic activity, and glacial shifts, as well as human-induced changes like urban expansion, agricultural development, and infrastructure stress. ISRO says the NISAR satellite weighs 2,392 kg, and it will scan the entire globe and provide all-weather, day-and-night data at a 12-day interval and enable a wide range of applications. NISAR can detect changes in the Earth's surface, such as ground deformation, ice sheet movement and vegetation dynamics. Further applications include sea and ice classification, ship detection, shoreline monitoring, storm characterisation, changes in soil moisture, mapping and monitoring of surface water resources and disaster response. What sets NISAR apart is its dual-frequency radar system, a first-of-its-kind configuration in space. NASA has contributed the L-band radar, which penetrates vegetation and soil to reveal subsurface changes, while ISRO has provided the S-band radar, optimised for detecting surface-level features like foliage and terrain. These radars are mounted on a 12-meter mesh reflector antenna, roughly the size of a school bus, allowing the satellite to scan nearly all of Earth's land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. The satellite's ability to operate day and night, in all weather conditions, ensures a continuous and reliable stream of data. This is especially critical for regions prone to disasters, where timely information can mean the difference between life and death. As Nikki Fox, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, emphasises, "NISAR's data will help ensure the health and safety of those impacted on Earth, as well as the infrastructure that supports them." Beyond disaster response, NISAR will play a pivotal role in climate science, ecosystem monitoring, and resource management. It will help track groundwater depletion, forest density, wetland flooding, and coastal vegetation, offering insights that are essential for food and water security. More than 180 organisations from local governments to private companies are already preparing to use NISAR's data to inform decisions and policies. The mission also showcases the power of international cooperation. As Wendy Edelstein, NISAR's Deputy Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), noted, "NISAR is a 50-50 partnership between NASA and ISRO. It represents the largest collaboration in space between the United States and India." It has cost upwards of $1.3 billion. The satellite was built and tested over five years, with extensive integration work carried out in both countries. Ms Edelstein herself spent over 150 days in India working alongside ISRO engineers, highlighting the deep commitment and mutual respect between the two space agencies. Technologically, NISAR employs synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and interferometry to create high-resolution images and detect surface motion. SAR allows the satellite to simulate a much larger antenna by combining thousands of radar pulses, resulting in detailed imagery. Interferometry, on the other hand, enables the measurement of ground displacement over time by comparing radar signals from different passes. These techniques provide a 3D view of Earth's surface dynamics, crucial for understanding tectonic shifts, glacier movements, and land subsidence. The satellite's data will be open and accessible, aligning with NASA's commitment to open science. This ensures that researchers, policymakers, and emergency responders worldwide can benefit from NISAR's insights. As Karen St. Germain, Director of NASA's Earth Science Division, puts it, "NISAR is a model for the next generation of Earth observation capabilities." For India, NISAR is a strategic milestone in its growing space ambitions. It complements the country's Gaganyaan human spaceflight program, recent lunar and solar missions, and its expanding role in global space diplomacy. The launch also underscores India's technical prowess, with ISRO providing the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F16) launch vehicle, spacecraft bus, solar arrays, and ground support. The excitement surrounding NISAR is palpable. Paul Rosen, NISAR's Project Scientist at JPL, described the mission as the culmination of decades of work, calling it a "high-definition movie of the Earth." He highlighted how NISAR's radar can "see through foliage, study building footprints, measure flood depth," and even detect subtle shifts in tectonic plates. As the countdown to launch begins, NISAR stands as a beacon of scientific innovation and international unity. It promises to deepen our understanding of Earth's complex systems, enhance our ability to respond to environmental challenges, and inspire future collaborations in space exploration.


Business Standard
14 hours ago
- Business Standard
India Selected to Host International Space Leaders for Karman Week 2025
PRNewswire Berlin [Germany] / Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], July 24: The Karman Project, a global foundation advancing peace and cooperation in space, has announced that its flagship event 'Karman Week 2025' will take place in Bangalore, India, hosted by one of the world's leading Earth Intelligence companies, SatSure. The coveted annual gathering will convene 15 high-impact global leaders in space - including astronauts, agency heads, and industry executives - for a week in October of strategic dialogue, cultural exchange, and innovation showcases. This year's selected delegation includes Fellows from such organisations as Axiom Space, Airbus, the Saudi Space Agency, the UK Space Agency, and the Kenya Space Agency, among others. The Karman Project and SatSure share a long-standing relationship, with SatSure's Founder and CEO, Prateep Basu, selected as a Karman Fellow in 2020. As part of his Fellowship Commitment, Basu launched the SatSure Sparta platform - an internal initiative for making Earth observation data easy to consume and model for enabling financial inclusion of smallholder Indian farmers. The partnership reflects a shared mission to drive meaningful, cross-sectoral action in space, with Karman Week 2025 marking yet another milestone. "India is not only a leader in space exploration, but also a pioneer in using space technologies to address real-world challenges - be it agriculture, climate resilience, or disaster response," said Hannah Ashford, Managing Director of The Karman Project."Bringing our Fellowship to Bangalore allows us to engage directly with this spirit of purpose-driven innovation, and to connect our global leaders with one of the most dynamic and mission-oriented space ecosystems in the world." Bangalore is India's leading space and technology city, home to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and a flourishing startup and venture capital ecosystem. Karman Week 2025 will highlight India's leadership in public-private partnerships, climate-focused space applications, and international cooperation. The program will include direct engagements with the Indian space sector, alongside curated cultural activities and a nature-based leadership retreat. These immersive experiences aim to build trust and foster collaboration across borders and sectors. "Karman Week 2025 marks a significant moment for India's space ecosystem, and it's an honor for us to host it in Bangalore. It's an opportunity to highlight innovations emerging from India--particularly in space data and artificial intelligence--that are addressing global challenges in agriculture, climate, and sustainable development at scale," said Prateep Basu, Founder and CEO of SatSure. "As a Karman Fellow, I've seen the value of cross-border collaboration firsthand. We're excited to share India's journey and amplify conversations that turn vision into impact." Karman Week constitutes yet another landmark for India's monumental 2025 in outer space affairs. Demonstrating the country's strengths in both technical capability and international cooperation, this year has seen the 100th launch from India's primary spaceport, the Global Conference on Space Exploration in New Delhi, a docking maneuver between two satellites in orbit (a feat only three other nations have achieved), and ISRO astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla's groundbreaking mission as the first Indian to visit the International Space Station. With the Karman-SatSure partnership coming to fruition, the Indian private space sector makes a bold new statement about its commitment to facilitating international cooperation and building on ISRO's legacy of peaceful use of outer space. Now in its sixth edition, Karman Week has previously been held in countries including the United Arab Emirates, France, Maldives, and Bulgaria. The event is closed to the public and invitation-only, focused on deepening cooperation among the world's most responsible and influential space actors. Further program details will be released later in the year. For more information on the event or media inquiries, please contact: fellowship@ About The Karman Project The Karman Project is a global non-profit foundation promoting peace and security in space through international cooperation. The foundation's unique convening power enables it to bring together public and private sector decision-makers to build common understandings and impactful projects that advance sustainability, education, science, security, and capacity building efforts. To date, The Karman Project's highly curated community of entrepreneurs, astronauts, space executives, researchers, and artists from over 70 nations has initiated projects serving the immediate needs of more than five million people worldwide. The foundation is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. About SatSure Analytics India Private Limited (SatSure) SatSure is one of the world's most comprehensive Earth Observation (EO) data refinery platforms. With capabilities spanning both upstream EOaaS infrastructure, through its wholly-owned subsidiary KaleidEO, and downstream analytics, SatSure delivers end-to-end, EO data-driven decision intelligence through industry-specific, contextual solutions that are scalable, accessible, and operationally meaningful. SatSure's subsidiary KaleidEO strengthens the EO ecosystem by developing high-resolution, multispectral EO payloads with edge computing capabilities. Together, SatSure and KaleidEO offer a full-stack EO value chain, built in India for the world, empowering emerging nations by equipping stakeholders with decision intelligence for faster, smarter, and more informed action.


United News of India
a day ago
- United News of India
Faster spinning Earth prompts timekeepers to consider unprecedented move
California, July 23 (UNI) As the Earth is spinning faster this summer, the days have become marginally shorter, attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers. July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by More exceptionally, short days are coming on July 22 and August five, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively, reported CNN. The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one full rotation on its axis —24 hours or 86,400 seconds on average. But in reality, each rotation is slightly irregular due to a variety of factors, such as the gravitational pull of the moon, seasonal changes in the atmosphere and the influence of Earth's liquid core. As a result, a full rotation usually takes slightly less or slightly more than 86,400 seconds — a discrepancy of just milliseconds that doesn't have any obvious effect on everyday life. However, these discrepancies can, in the long run, affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, which is why even the smallest time deviations are tracked using atomic clocks, which were introduced in 1955. Some experts believe this could lead to a scenario similar to the Y2K problem, which threatened to bring modern civilization to a halt. Atomic clocks count the oscillations of atoms held in a vacuum chamber within the clock itself to calculate 24 hours to the utmost degree of precision. We call the resulting time UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on around 450 atomic clocks and is the global standard for timekeeping, as well as the time to which all our phones and computers are set. Astronomers also keep track of Earth's rotation — using satellites that check the position of the planet relative to fixed stars, for example — and can detect minute differences between the atomic clocks' time and the amount of time it actually takes Earth to complete a full rotation. Last year, on July five, 2024, Earth experienced the shortest day ever recorded since the advent of the atomic clock 65 years ago, at 1.66 milliseconds less than 24 hours. 'We've been on a trend toward slightly faster days since 1972,' said Duncan Agnew, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a research geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. Since 1972, a total of 27 leap seconds have been added to the UTC, but the rate of addition has increasingly slowed, due to Earth speeding up; nine leap seconds were added throughout the 1970s while no new leap seconds have been added since 2016. In 1972, after decades of rotating relatively slowly, Earth's spin had accumulated such a delay relative to atomic time that the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service mandated the addition of a 'leap second' to the UTC. This is similar to the leap year, which adds an extra day to February every four years to account for the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the time it takes for Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. The shortest-term changes in Earth's rotation, Agnew said, come from the moon and the tides, which make it spin slower when the satellite is over the equator and faster when it's at higher or lower altitudes. This effect compounds with the fact that during the summer Earth naturally spins faster — the result of the atmosphere itself slowing down due to seasonal changes, such as the jet stream moving north or south; the laws of physics dictate that the overall angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant, so the rotation speed lost by the atmosphere is picked up by the planet itself. Similarly, for the past 50 years, Earth's liquid core has also been slowing down, with the solid Earth around it speeding up. By looking at the combination of these effects, scientists can predict if an upcoming day could be particularly short. 'These fluctuations have short-period correlations, which means that if Earth is speeding up on one day, it tends to be speeding up the next day, too,' said Judah Levine, a physicist and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the time and frequency division. While one short day doesn't make any difference, Levine said, the recent trend of shorter days is increasing the possibility of a negative leap second. The prospect of a negative leap second raises concerns because there are still ongoing problems with positive leap seconds after 50 years, he explained. UNI XC SS