On 29 June this year, the Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s when scientists began measuring the planet's rotation with high precision atomic clocks.
Broadly speaking, the Earth completes a full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years.
But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected.
In the past few years, a flurry of records has fallen, with shorter days being notched up ever more frequently. In 2020 the Earth had 28 of the shortest days in the past 50 years, with the shortest of those, on 19 July, shaving 1.47 milliseconds off the 86,400 seconds that make up 24 hours. The 29 June record came close to being broken again last month when 26 July came in 1.5 milliseconds short.
This story is from the August 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the August 02, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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