On Tue 2021-01-12T08:09:58-0700 Jonathan Leffler hath writ:
There were a number of articles about a week ago with some details about the amount by which the earth is spinning faster.
One such is: https://www.space.com/earth-spinning-faster-negative-leap-second.html
That appears to be a report from Live Science — I've not tracked down the original.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 7:57 AM Koning, Paul <Paul.Koning@dell.com> wrote:
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion?
Apologies, I forget that not everyone is running weekly cron jobs that interrogate the ongoing publications of IERS bureaus in order to track earth rotation. It has been faster during 2020, but not enough that a negative leap second looks likely. Still, predicting the weather in the earth's core is hard, so it is not impossible. The original impetus for the articles was almost certainly Time and Date dot com who have been running an ongoing page of the IERS numbers with sports statistics about how fast the earth is rotating. See https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-rotation.html and their year end summary at https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-faster-rotation.html It looks like a reporter for a UK newspaper picked up on that and interviewed Peter Whibberley of NPL in order to start the sequence of bots reproducing the original and other reporters rephrasing. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m